Twenty-five candidates for the presidency of Costa Rica: who will succeed Carlos Alvarado?
Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado cannot run for another term.
Ezequiel BECERRA AFP/File
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
"The Switzerland of Central America" - no armed conflict for 70 years and no dictatorship for more than a century - must choose a new president but also renew its entire one-chamber parliament.
Costa Rican particularity: President Carlos Alvarado like the deputies cannot stand for re-election, consecutive mandates are prohibited.
Advertising
Read more
If Costa Rica broke its record of candidates, a few days before the vote, 30 to 40% of the 3.5 million voters were still undecided.
What is certain is that the centre-left party, in power since 2014, the Citizen Action Party, will not stay there: its candidate is capped at 0.3% of voting intentions...
In recent years, the economic situation has deteriorated: unemployment rose from 8.1% in 2017 to 14.4% last November.
23% of the population lives below the poverty line, public debt reaches 70% of GDP – one of the highest in Latin America.
The Covid has also hit the tourism sector, a driving force of the economy, hard.
And cases of corruption, rare in the country, splashed parties and ministers.
As a result, candidates from two parties that had dominated Costa Rican political life in the 20th century came out on top in the polls: ex-president José Maria Figueres, of the National Liberation Party, and lawyer Lineth Saborio of the Social-Christian Unity Party.
In third position, the far-right candidate Fabricio Alvarado - who in 2018 had arrived for the second round thanks to a tightening of the debate around marriage for all.
Newsletter
Receive all the international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_EN
Costa Rica