This Sunday, Costa Rica – one of the best democracies in all of Latin America – will go to the polls to elect President, two vice-presidents and 57 deputies. However, for the presidential chair it is expected that it will be necessary to go to a second round on April 3.
(Read here: Democratic quality in Latin America is in ‘intensive care’)
After the wave of electoral victories of the left in Peru, Chile and Honduras in 2021, with the expectation of the results in Colombia and Brazil this year and the consolidation of the socialist regimes in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, the elections Today’s generals emerge as a decisive test for the most stable democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last 70 years.
Costa Rica, the only one of the 19 Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries in the area that has never experienced military dictatorships, coups, civil wars or single-party regimes from the second half of the 20th century, will attend a historic contest in the polls among 25 presidential candidates-from the radical left to the orthodox right-as one of the most unequal nations of the century.
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With a social, labor and educational reform from 1940 to 1944 and without an army since 1948, which allowed it to turn the barracks into museums, eliminate the military budget, strengthen spending on health and education, entrust its internal security to a civilian police and its external defense in international law, peaceful Costa Rica arrives at the elections with the challenge of containing the accelerated social deterioration registered in the last 30 years.
Unemployment, female underemployment, misery (23 percent of the population) and inequality in the distribution of income between rich and poor families are some of the factors that, added to the health emergency due to the coronavirus, have Costa Rica on the list of the 10 worst ranked countries.
The socioeconomic development born in the 1940s “had its brake from 1978 with privatization policies of public institutions, the structural adjustment programs that began in 1982 and the free trade agreements since the 1990s,” he told EL TIEMPO the historian, politician and former Costa Rican ambassador Vladimir de la Cruz.
“Today the future of the next 25 years is being played out when choosing who will assume the Government, as a party and as a person. This is the dilemma of political and electoral democracy in Costa Rica,” added De la Cruz.
For the politician, the key tasks of whoever assumes power will be to rebuild production and reactivate the economy, recover the socioeconomic indices prior to the pandemic, recover the nearly 500,000 jobs that were lost in the last two years, and facilitate new investments.
Not minor tasks when about one and a half million Costa Ricans, the equivalent of 40 percent of voters, have a monthly income of less than 200 dollars, in a society that has a high cost of living.
“Unfortunately, these issues have not been the axis of the electoral campaign that has gravitated in the discussion of economic policies, difficult to digest for the large electorate,” warned the expert.
Political X-ray of Costa Rica
With a peaceful electoral tradition for more than 70 years, today’s elections will be held under the surveillance of observers from America and Europe and will be the 21st presidential election since the current political constitution of Costa Rica came into force in 1949.
In the fight there are 25 presidential candidates. If none receives at least 40 percent of the votes, a second round must be called between the two most voted, which will be on April 3.
In the vast offer, the surveys placed six with the preferences. The winner will take office on May 8 for a four-year term.
José María Figueres, president from 1994 to 1998 and of the opposition National Liberation Party (PLN), emerged as the favorite to advance to the second, although not excluding the surprise that he triumphs in the first. Lineth Saborío, vice president from 2002 to 2006 and of the opposition Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC), appears in second place.
With both candidates in the lead and advancing to April, bipartisanship could return this year.
In a range from center to center-right, the forces around the PLN and the PUSC alternated in government from 1949 to 2014 until they were defeated by the center-left Citizen Action Party (PAC), which broke the tradition of control of both parties and governed in two consecutive periods: from 2014 to 2018 with Luis Guillermo Solís and from 2018 to 2022 with Carlos Alvarado.
The polls ranked evangelical pastor Fabricio Alvarado, of the opposition New Republic Party (PNR), third. In the following positions are the opponents José María Villalta, from the leftist Broad Front (FA), Rodrigo Chaves, from the centrist Social Democratic Progress Party (PPSD), and Eliécer Feinzaig, from the center-right Progressive Liberal Party (PLP).
In a context of apathy and uncertainty, and unlike Colombia, Brazil, Chile, Honduras and Peru, Costa Rica aims to return to the fold of center governments, faithful but disagreeing with the United States, close to Chile and Colombia and the Union European, open to links with China and Russia and distant with Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The official Welmer Ramos, from the PAC, seems relegated in the race, although the panorama is changing with more than 40% of voters still undecided. However, the shadow of corruption scandals and socioeconomic deterioration is growing larger and haunts the PAC and casts a shadow over its future.
“Costa Rica is risking the peaceful transfer of power. The context is that of a very weakened government (…) due to political mismanagement “in the face of the economic crisis and corruption linked to Alvarado’s management,” said Costa Rican lawyer and political scientist Constantino Urcuyo, academic director of the Center for Research and Training Administrative Politician (CIAPA) and professor at universities in Europe and America.
“How to combat inequality in the fiscal crisis and the pandemic is at stake. But the democratic regime is not at stake, under any circumstances. There is no position of any candidate that has connotations against the democratic system,” Urcuyo explained to EL TIEMPO.
Emphasizing that it is “an election within the framework of the democratic regime” of this country and with the evident differences between the candidates, he described: “It is the democratic normality that is taking place calmly these days in Costa Rica.”
Jose Melendez
SPECIAL FOR WEATHER
SAINT JOSEPH
On Twitter: @josmelndez3
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