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Caribbean & Central America - April 2014 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Solís secures the presidency

It was one of the few predictable developments in the Costa Rican electoral race. On 6 April Luis Guillermo Solís of the opposition centre-left, Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC), won the presidential run-off against Johnny Araya of the ruling centrist Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN). Solís’s victory, which gives the PAC its first four-year term in office, had been widely expected following Araya’s shock decision to abandon the electoral campaign last month [RC-14-03] (although his name remained on the ballot). While Solís managed to exceed his target 1m votes (out of an electorate of 3.08m), abstention was still 43.4%- beating the previous record (39.8%) registered in 2002, the last time a presidential election went to a run-off. The big question now is how far Araya and the PLN will go to honour their pledge to serve as a “constructive opposition” once Solís takes office. This will be crucial given that the PAC will have just 13 seats in the new 57-member unicameral legislature, which with nine different parties represented, will be the most fragmented in the country’s history.

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