Election of the Day: Costa Rica

Today is the day for the first round election in the selection of Costa Rica’s 50th president. (Fun fact: the current regime in Costa Rica has a good case for “third oldest continuous presidential regime” behind the US and Chile (1830-1973). There’s a case for putting them 4th behind Uruguay (1830-1933), depending on whether one classifies the spot of trouble that regime ran into in the late 1870’s as regime change, a controversy I can offer no worthwhile opinion about.) The only real doubt about today’s election is whether it will be decisive, or whether a second round election will be necessary. Laura Fernandez, representing the Sovereign People’s Party (PPSO), is polling right at or slightly over 40%, the threshold for avoiding a second round runoff. There’s a large number of undecided voters, so if even a very small fraction of them select her, or a larger fraction of them don’t vote, boosting her percentage, it’s over: Hernandez is a continuity candidate for outgoing president, Rodrigo Chaves Robles:

Now, his handpicked successor, Laura Fernández, has emerged as the front-runner in a race where she is competing against 19 other candidates — including a former first lady and a high school teacher.

Ms. Fernández, 39, who served as Mr. Chaves’s chief liaison with the Legislative Assembly, is hovering at or above the 40 percent threshold needed to secure a first-round victory and avoid a runoff, according to recent polls.

Her closest opponents, Álvaro Ramos, an economist and technocrat, and Claudia Dobles, a former first lady with a progressive agenda, remain in a distant second place with 9 and 8.6 percent of likely voters, respectively, according to a recent poll by the University of Costa Rica.

While Costa Rican law bars Mr. Chaves from seeking a consecutive term, Ms. Fernández has mostly campaigned on a platform that would see a continuation of his mandate, a message that has resonated with an electorate deeply troubled by rising crime.

PPSO is in the ‘right-populist with some illiberal tendencies’ category; one major ongoing initiative, that Fernandez’s victory will all but ensure comes to fruition, is the construction of a new mega-prison complex overtly modeled after Bukele’s CECOT facility in El Salvador.

The legislature is also up for election; the 57 seat body is elected via closed list PR in seven districts. Fernandez has repeatedly stated that her goal is to capture 40 seats, which seems ambitious; PPSO is currently polling around 30% on the legislative side. That puts them well behind the leading response in legislative polling, “don’t know/didn’t answer” at around 50%. If one wants to be optimistic about something, one could hope that anyone who wants to vote PPSO would have decided to do so by now, so those voters are likely to break for other parties. That said, it’s unclear how much it matters; Chaves hasn’t been terribly slowed down by a lack of co-partisans in the assembly.

Right wing dominance is not the norm in Costa Rica, and the popularity of PPSO appears to be motivated by horror and dismay at the recent and substantial upswing in violent crime, in a country that has largely avoided the region’s pathologies in this regard until recently. Costa Rica has become a major nexus in global cocaine distribution, with all that that entails. Unlike Bukele in El Salvador, though, Chaves and PPSO have not achieved any meaningful reduction in crime so far; murders surged to their highest level in 2023, after Chaves was elected, and have stayed at historic highs since. Still, voters apparently hold the view that they deserve more time in their efforts to implement an ever so slightly kinder and gentler version to the Salvadoran solution in Costa Rica.