Chinchilla wins Costa Rica in resounding victory for the right
Costa Rica has elected its first woman president, with the former vice president Laura Chinchilla winning a landslide victory as exit polls were counted this morning.
Chinchilla garnered nearly half the vote at 47 per cent, while opposition candidates Otton Solis from Citizen Action and Otto Guevara from the Libertarian Movement mustered just over a fifth of the electorate each, at 25 and 21 per cent respectively. The outcome sends a resounding message that Costa Rica’s pro-business policies are here to stay, no matter how many leftist governments succeed in winning over the rest of Latin America.
Chinchilla will continue the reign of Costa Rica’s centrist right National Liberation party when she takes office in May, becoming Latin America’s fifth-ever female president. The social conservative who opposes gay marriage and abortion campaigned on the platform of maintaining incumbent president Oscar Arias’s free market policies, which the country’s business community is celebrating as a victory for continued stability in a tumultuous region.
Costa Rica has been hailed as the “Switzerland of the Americas” with one of the most prosperous and stable economies in Latin America. The country abandoned its military completely in 1949, avoiding the region’s cold war conflicts, and has since invested heavily in tourism and environmental sustainability.
In recent years Costa Rica has unanimously embraced the neoliberal right. As the Christian Science Monitor, CSM, notes, out of the four main competitors for the presidency only one was leftward leaning. Libertarian candidate Guevara, who surged in the polls, called for the privatization of Costa Rica’s popular public health system, while the once flourishing leftist party Citizen Action barely won 24 per cent of the vote after losing the last election in 2006 by only two percentage points.
So why has Costa Rica so successfully left the Left behind?
Part of the reason can be pinned down to the popularity of outgoing president Oscar Arias, a Nobel laureate winner who ushered in the Central American Free Trade Agreement, CAFTA, and gained acclaim for his role in brokering the political standoff following the coup in neighbouring Honduras.
And the growth in popularity of Harvard-trained attorney Guevara, who intended on replacing the local currency with US dollars, certainly stole a fair share of the vote away from Solis. Many saw Guevara as an alternative to the traditional parties, but his success at the polls only served to weaken the opposition against Chinchilla.
Other analysts say that the rule of the right comes down to the fact that Costa Rica has never been ideologically motivated; the far-left in countries like Nicaragua and El Salvador has never taken hold in Costa Rica.
As the previous Costa Rican vice president under Arias, Kevin Casas-Zamora, told the CSM: “For most voters, the decision is between more traditional options and emerging ones. It’s the established politics versus those who are critical of the current administration. You can’t see Costa Rican politics through the lens of left and right.”
And as the Huffington Post points out, “Costa Ricans are reluctant to shake up the status quo when the country maintains relatively high salaries, the longest life expectancy in Latin America and near-universal literacy”.
But not everyone is happy with the outcome. According to the Guardian one candidate, Luis Fishman, ran under the slogan that of all the presidential hopefuls, he was the “lesser evil”.
Critics say that Chinchilla’s policies will encourage economic development above the needs of the nation’s ecosystem and workers. Environmentalists oppose the president-elect’s promotion of open-pit mining, while labour unions dislike her pro-US trade policies. Having failed to secure a majority in Congress, Chinchilla will have to take a more conciliatory approach in her economic and energy policies.
But while some say that Chinchilla is in for a difficult ride, there is no doubt that she has a clear mandate to govern the country as she sees fit. And as all indicators suggest, for Costa Rica, this means more of the same.
Tags: CAFTA, Chinchilla wins elections, Citizen Action, Costa Rica, elections, free-market policies, Honduras, Kevin Casas-Zamora, Latin America, Laura Chinchilla, left, Libertarian movement, Luis Fishman, National Liberation party, Oscar Arias, Otto Guevara, Otton Solis, pro-business, right, rise of the right
