Surprises and Runoff Votes: The Apparent New Rules in Costa Rica's Elections.
| Autor | Rodriguez, George |
Once again in Costa Rica, an underdog candidate, scoring below the margin of error in early surveys, surprisingly surfaced to take the lead in a presidential election, triggering a runoff to determine who will take the country's top job for the next four years.
Costa Rica's two traditional parties are out of the second race, displaced by two relatively new political organizations--a rightist Christian group and the center-left organization now in power. The outcome of the first round, which took place on Feb. 4, left two candidates at opposing poles regarding the divisive issues of gender identity and same-sex marriage.
The 2014 contest saw a similar phenomenon when current president Luis Guillermo Solis, of the center-left Partido Accion Ciudadana (Citizen Action Party, PAC) rose from the depths of the opinion polls (NotiCen, April 17, 2014, and Sept. 4, 2014).
PAC had been founded 14 years before, and firs took part in an election in 2002, when it came in third to the traditional Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (Social Christian Unity Party, PUSC) and its historic rival, the social democratic Partido Liberacion Nacional (PLN).
In the next vote, in 2006, PAC went up one step, to position itself second after the PLN, displacing the PUSC, which had been devastated by major corruption scandals that landed two of its top leaders and former Costa Rican presidents in jail (NotiCen, Sept. 4, 2003, Oct. 7, 2004, Nov. 4, 2004).
In the Feb. 4 elections, Fabricio Alvarado, the only member of Congress from the Partido Restauracion Nacional (National Restoration Party, PRN), who started the campaign as an unlikely prospect, came in first and has shot at the presidency. Carlos Alvarado of the PAC, a former Labor Minister in Solis' Cabinet, came in second and will be in the runoff, which is scheduled for April 1.
The two Alvarados, who despite their deep ideological differences share not only a last name but also a profession--both are journalists--respectively reaped a major election benefit from two sensitive issues that have divided Costa Rican society along inflexible ideological and religious lines: gender identity and same-sex marriage (NotiCen, Aug. 3, 2017).
The detonator for this was an advisory opinion on both topics issued in November by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in San Jose, and released in early January, less than a month before the first election round. Based on the 1978 American Convention of Human Rights, the court...
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