2022 Uruguayan Law of Urgent Consideration referendum

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Referendum on the Urgent Consideration Law

27 March 2022 (2022-03-27)
Referendum appeal against 135 articles of Law No. 19,889 of 9 July 2020
Outcome	Repeal rejected
Results
Choice Votes % Yes 1,078,425 48.67% No 1,108,360 50.02% Blank votes 29,121 1.31% Valid votes 2,215,906 96.39% Invalid votes 83,031 3.61% Total votes 2,298,937 100.00% Registered voters/turnout 2,684,131 85.65%
Results by department:   Yes   No

A referendum on the Urgent Consideration Law was held in Uruguay to ask the electorate if 135 articles of Law 19,889 (known as the "Urgent Consideration Law", "Urgency Law" or simply "LUC") – approved by the General Assembly in 2020 and considered as the main legislative initiative of the coalition government of President Luis Lacalle Pou — should be repealed.^[1][2] It was the result of a campaign promoted by various social and political actors such as the national trade union center PIT-CNT and the opposition party Broad Front. On 8 July 2021, almost 800,000 adhesions were delivered to the Electoral Court, exceeding 25% of the total number of registered voters who are constitutionally required to file a referendum appeal against a law.^[3][4]

Article 168 of the Uruguayan Constitution establishes that the Executive Branch may submit bills to the General Assembly declaring them "of urgent consideration". In this case, the House that receives the bill in the first instance has a period of 45 days to put it into consideration; if the term expires without the bill being rejected, it is considered approved in its original form and is communicated to the other House, which has a term of 30 days, and in case of approving a bill with modifications, it must re-enter the first House where it will have another 15 days for consideration. If after this period there is no express statement that demonstrates common agreement between the houses regarding the modifications, the bill is sent to the General Assembly, which will have 10 days to consider it.^[5] With this constitutional mechanism, if a bill does not receive parliamentary approval within the stipulated periods, it automatically becomes law in the form in which it was sent by the Executive Power.^[6]

Since the transition to democracy in 1985, only 13 bills were sent to Parliament with a declaration of "urgent consideration" (0.003% of the total bills sent by the Executive in that period), of which 9 were approved and 4 were rejected.^[7] All governments applied the mechanism, except for the second terms of Julio María Sanguinetti and Tabaré Vázquez. However, in most of these cases urgent consideration was used for specific topics and only 3 bill fall into the category of “Omnibus bill”, based on the number of topics covered.^[7]

For the repeal to happen, the total of yes votes had to reach the absolute majority of valid votes, which included blank ones.^[8] It thus failed, only 48.67 % of the total votes including blank ones being for the repeal.