![]() ![]() ![]() Many don’t believe that politicians – viewed as ‘all the same’, which means equally bad – can solve them. Fewer and fewer people turn to politics in search of a solution to their problems. Successive governments of various colours have come and gone, but problems have remained. For growing sections of the public, politics has lost its old meaning: what is at stake is no longer a choice between models of society or ideological projects, but rather candidates’ personal ambitions. Over the past decade, discontent has risen. And it’s among those where the highest proportions of respondents believe corruption has greatly increased.įor several decades, Costa Rica was a viewed as a ‘model democracy’ with consolidated political parties and stable political identities, characterised by predictable two-party competition in which centre-left and centre-right parties alternated in power. It is second only to Paraguay as the country where the most people, 89 per cent, believe the powerful rule for their own benefit. Unlike in Uruguay, trust in the government, congress and political parties is very low.Ĭosta Rica stands out as one of the countries in the region where very few people believe the government is ruling for the benefit of the majority: a meagre nine per cent think so, compared to a regional average of 22 per cent. According to the most recent Latinobarómetro report, a much lower proportion of Costa Ricans than Uruguayans are satisfied with the functioning of their democracy: 24 vs. But many warn that the idyllic image of a democratic, prosperous and egalitarian Costa Rica is largely now a myth, and one that can be a curse that downplays very real problems.Īlthough often classed together as two small countries in many ways exceptional for the region, the similarities between Costa Rica and Uruguay do not run deep. But Costa Rica continues to have a healthier civic space than most Latin American countries.Īlongside Uruguay, Costa Rica continues to be viewed as a ‘democratic exception’ in the region. In December 2020 the CIVICUS Monitor downgraded Costa Rica’s civic space from open to narrowed, largely as a result of the worsening conditions for Indigenous human rights defenders and the government’s efforts to limit the right to strike and criminalise protest. ![]() The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index has long classed Costa Rica as a full democracy, albeit at the lower end of the scale. Unlike most Latin American countries, Costa Rica did not experience dictatorships, military coups or civil wars between the 1960s and 1980s unlike a few others with a similar history, notably Venezuela, it also didn’t see later processes of democratic erosion and become an autocracy. Scoring only 16.8 per cent in the first round, the man who would be president – a newcomer economist with a far from pristine record who campaigned for the renewal of politics and promised to ‘put the house in order’ – barely scraped into the run-off. They included the candidate of the ruling Citizen Action Party, who came a distant 10 th, with 0.7 per cent its legislative list received 2.2 per cent, earning no seats in the Legislative Assembly. Votes cast in the presidential race were distributed among numerous candidates, including a whopping 19 contenders who each got less than one per cent. Had it been up to them, Costa Rica’s highest political office would have remained vacant.Ībstention and political fragmentation reached record levels in 2022. In February, just over 40 per cent of registered voters – the threshold a candidate must surpass to be elected in the first round – didn’t bother to vote. But the pair that emerged from the February first-round vote – José María Figueres Olsen of the long-established National Liberation Party (PLN) and surprise challenger Rodrigo Chaves Robles of the upstart Social Democratic Progress Party – hardly went into the run-off with enthusiastic public backing. Costa Rica’s 3 April presidential run-off election pitted the top two candidates against each other. ![]()
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