Hyperpolitics and Vacant Citizenship in Uruguay: A Hermeneutic Analysis of Andrés Ojeda’s Presidential Campaign

Abstract

The aim of the article was to analyze Andrés Ojeda’s 2024 presidential campaign in Uruguay through an articulation of Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of “hyperpolitics” and Wendy Brown’s concept of “empty citizenship.” Adopting a hermeneutic approach, the study examined the campaign’s speeches, public interventions, and digital materials in order to translate Sloterdijk’s philosophical diagnosis into analytical dimensions applicable to the case study. The analysis identified a set of features—such as extreme personalization, the aesthetic centrality of discourse, the displacement of traditional ideological cleavages, and the prominence of digital platforms—that configure a mode of doing politics centered on personalism, image construction, and appeals to individualized identities. The article offered an operationalization of the notion of hyperpolitics through a case study and linked it to contemporary transformations of democracy. It further argued that Ojeda’s emergence not only expressed a disruptive electoral strategy within the Uruguayan political arena but also constituted a situated manifestation of hyperpolitical dynamics that shape the perception and configuration of the political subject. In this way, the article contributed both to the theoretical discussion of hyperpolitics and neoliberal rationality and to the analysis of recent mutations in the Uruguayan political system within the Latin American context.