Winds of change blowing among surprises

Ever since November of last year the electoral campaign has brought one surprise after another. Winds of change they are a-blowin’, with the country moving toward a new, more parliamentary and pluralist political dynamic.

Karina Fonseca Vindas

Costa Rica is experiencing winds of change. Over three decades of bipartisan political order, during which power was divvied up between the National Liberation Party (PLN) and the Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC), has been broken with unexpected force. This has led to surprises in the first round of elections, held on Sunday, February 2, as well as afterward.

In retrospect, several signs in the past decade have presaged this chain of surprises.

2000: The PAC was born

The Citizen’s Action Party (PAC) was born in 2000 as a new political option headed up by economist Ottón Sólis, formerly of the PLN. He announced that the PAC would fight against neoliberalism, corruption and the traditional waste in public administration. The PAC was presented as the “center” alternative with a code of ethics on which it bestowed great importance.

Two years later the PAC participated for the first time in national elections, ending up as the electorate’s third choice, enough to give it 14 seats in the Legislative Assembly. Regrettably, 6 of those representatives soon split from their designated bench and grouped together under the Patriotic Bloc because they refused to comply with the PAC’s ethical code, which was obliging them to renounce certain privileges guaranteed by their new parliamentary investiture. That represented a first setback for the new party.

2004: A year of scandals

2004 was a key year in the country, due to the jailing and initiation of criminal prosecution against top-level officials and even two former Presidents, Rafael Ángel Calderón and Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, all of them PUSC members. The corruption accusations against them shook national and international public opinion.

Together with the notable neoliberal shift in the country, with its more precarious living conditions for more and more Costa Ricans, and the incompetency and increasingly blatant corrupt practices of officials in power, those scandals began to distance Costa Rican Society from the promises of both traditional parties, particularly the PUSC, which went into the 2006 national elections very weakened, thus opening things up for the PAC’s presidential candidate.

2006: The PAC almost won

In 2006, PAC candidate Ottón Solís very nearly beat out PLN candidate Oscar Arias Sánchez, who has lost a lot of popularity within our country despite his Nobel Peace Prize, a shield that protects him from all criticism with the international community.

His new victory in 2006 meant Arias was governing for a second time. His first administration had been in 1986-1990 and many had frowned upon his interference in the process that eliminated the constitutional impediment to his reelection. In the 2006 elections, barely 1% separated the winner from the loser: Arias came out the victor with 42.26% of the votes to Solís’ 41.11%.

2010: Chinchilla beats out the PAC

In 2010, Ottón Solís ran for President for the third consecutive time, this time against PLN candidate Laura Chinchilla Miranda. He repeated his second-place ranking, thus achieving a certain level of consolidation, but was significantly further behind the front-runner than in the two previous elections, with Chinchilla pulling 46.91% of the votes to Solís’ 25.06%. The upsurge of what is considered Costa Rica’s extreme Right, the Libertarian Movement (ML), which won 20.92%, set off a social alarm.

In the heat of the moment, Solís rather hastily said he would only run for President again if God spoke to him to ask him to. In the succeeding years he tried to nuance that statement by adding that, in addition to “divine backing,” he would accept his party’s nomination if an electoral alliance could be put together that didn’t already have a candidate, although he insisted that both scenarios were impossible.

2013: Winds of change begin to blow

Although in 2010 several analysts believed Costa Rica’s democratic system was maturing and a pluri-party system was being put together, enthusiasm over that positive feature suffered ups and downs. At the beginning of 2013, we believed we might see a third consecutive PLN administration for the first time in history, despite the Chinchilla government’s series of errors and horrors. With what was beginning to happen by the end of the year, however, we began to think the PLN’s decline had come sooner than expected, although still later than we would have wished.

November 2013:
The first poll

In November, the first electoral poll still showed PLN presidential candidate Johnny Araya as the voters’ favorite. The results of the Borge y Asociados poll revealed that if the election were held at that time, 50.1% of the voters would go with the incumbent party’s candidate. One of every two Costa Ricans, in other words, would choose the former mayor of San José as the country’s next President.

Broad Front candidate José María Villalta was in second place with 19.1% and Otto Guevara, three-time candidate of the Libertarian Movement, came in third with 16.9%. Lagging way behind were PUSC candidate Rodolfo Piza with 4.8% and the PAC’s Luis Guillermo Solís, no relation to Otto Solís, the PAC’s earlier candidate, with only 4.3%.

Araya was a poor candidate

Something seemed out of whack about those data. President Chinchilla’s administration was wracked by huge corruption scandals, an unstable Cabinet, a legislative bench that wasn’t backing her with the forcefulness she would have wished and a deterioration of her government’s image given the struggles won by the organized citizenry around such heated issues as the definitive closing of mining exploitation, approval of in vitro fertilization and the halting of the million dollar concession for an important highway. All this expressed growing collective displeasure and the urgent need for a change of course.

But there was that poll: Johnny Araya, the governing party’s candidate, looked like the clear winner. It seemed all sown up that the Latin American President with the worst popularity rating would turn the presidential sash over to her party’s pretender. Madness perhaps, but endorsed by that survey.

The electoral campaign itself changed the scenario, mobilized society and shaped new tendencies. Johnny Araya may well have been the PLN’s worst possible choice to win another presidential term. He has various lawsuits pending against him, spent 21 years as municipal mayor of San José with very little to show for it, has limited debating skills and, if all that wasn’t enough, was saddled with the widely rejected deficiencies of the Chinchilla administration, branding him as the representative of the continuation of a bad government. Despite that glowing first poll, his position was fragile.

The big surprise:
A three-way technical tie

That’s when we were hit by the first big surprise, or perhaps better said, the reality many unhappy sectors were pining for. The floor had begun to mover under the virtual winner.

What shook the traditional political class the most was a UNIMER poll published two months before the elections by the Costa Rican daily La Nación. It unexpectedly revealed a three-way technical tie among the PLN, the Libertarian Movement and the Broad Front.

The Broad Front’s Villalta had 22.2%, Araya 20.3% and Guevara 20.2%. PAC candidate Luis Guillermo Solís trailed far behind those three favorites with 5.5%. The idea of the Left represented by the Broad Front coming in first, even in a three-way tie, was an unheard-of scenario. Some took advantage of the situation to present it as a terrifying possibility.

A fear campaign
against the Broad Front

Learning of the technical tie, the PLN and the ML each focused its respective energies on launching a battery of attacks against the Broad Front, hoping to reverse its unexpected growth. The Broad Front, in turn, charged that it was a victim of a “fear campaign” with the specter of anti-communism emerging as a central issue for the two rightwing parties in the debates and in their propaganda messages.

Such attacks were tirelessly repeated, and several transnational corporations with offices in Costa Rica, including Avon and Subway, were denounced to the Supreme Elections Tribunal (TSE) for warning their workers of the risks of “communists” coming to government, including a supposed massive loss of jobs because foreign capital would leave the country.

“They called us communists because they can’t call us thieves,” retorted the Broad Front candidate in his defense. Because he was 36, Villalta was also accused of inexperience and criticized for supporting legislation open to the interruption of pregnancies. His opponents warned that he would be unable to form a governing team and criticized some not very viable proposals in his government plan.

The appeal to voters not to go to extremes—either the extreme right of Otto the Libertarian or the extreme left of the “Communist,” “chaotic,” “pro-Ortega and pro-Chávez” Broad Front—didn’t lack the capacity to convince. The PLN went particularly overboard in its attempt to discredit Villalta but the ML also made recurring use of the same scare tactics against both him and the Broad Front.

The PLN again or “never again”?

The governing party tried to position itself in Costa Ricans’ self-image as “the center option,” appealing to the fervor and social demands of the Liberationists in times past. “Let’s not go to extremes,” PLN spokespeople insisted, abandoning Araya’s main slogan from the start of his campaign, when he invited people to “hire him for the post of President.” The scuttlebutt against Araya in the social networks and his big drop in the polls obliged him to give a new spin to his communication strategy, to the extreme of even changing his publicity agency.

The idea of “PLN never again” began to take hold among the population. The smoke of these battles made it hard to see that people were beginning to put their money on the heretofore ignored PAC candidate, Luis Guillermo Solís.

February 2:
Portrait of a winner

Solís is a university professor, historian and political scientist and, like Ottón Solís, was a PLN member for many years, leaving it eight years ago to join the PAC. He¡s empathic, strategic, conciliatory, an excellent speaker and the best debater.

All alone, he went about fitting himself out as the center alternative, and achieved an unanticipated growth never picked up by the polls, which always showed him far behind the parties heading up voting intentions. This “dark horse” phenomenon allowed him to move up the field without the obstacles the Broad Front candidate had to dodge, constantly defending himself against the accusation that he was a “communist threat.”

“You don’t know me”

Solís kicked off his campaign with the slogan “You don’t know me.” On that basis, he successfully developed a clever, high-quality strategy for both conventional media and the social networks.

In one of his first TV ads he invited people to get to know him and explained his break with the PLN this way:

“I told them I rejected their abandonment of the middle class and their adoption of an exclusionary and unjust wealth-concentrating model that has submerged thousands upon thousands of our compatriots in poverty. I renounced the corruption, the incapacity, the ineptitude, the politicking and the electoral fraud. The values I believe in aren’t to be found in the National Liberation Party. That’s why I’ve joined thousands and thousands of you in the ranks of the Citizens’ Action Party. From there we’ll rescue Costa Rica.” And he brought the message to a close by saying: “I’m Luis Guillermo Solís, a citizen like you. And it would be good for us to start getting to know each other.”

A point of unrest

Perhaps one of the topics that caused the greatest unrest among PAC activists was the naming of two former PUSC politicians as Solís’ first and second vice presidential running mates: former minister Helio Fallas, who at least left the PUSC to join the PAC years ago, and former minister/former legislator Ana Helena Chacón, from a family with considerable economic weight in the country. She actively defended approval of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) in 2007, when “NO to CAFTA” was a priority issue for the PAC and many other social movements.

For a party whose code of ethics is supposed to have a preponderant role, choosing a running mate who favored aggravating neoliberal policies in Costa was clearly a profound contradiction. But as memory is sometimes short and the desire to get the PLN out of power has been a constant, the PAC campaign continued its course.

February 2:
Surprise and abstention

On Sunday, February 2, election day, it seemed almost certain there would be a second round, as it would be very hard for any of the candidates to hit the 40% required to win the presidency on the first round. What was less clear was whether that second round would see the PLN up against the Broad Front, the ML or the PAC. The possibility of facing off against the PAC was the most remote, given what the polls had been saying.

As early as 8:30 that night, when the TSE presented the first results, the prognoses that had abounded in previous months began to go up in smoke. As the definitive manual count of the polling tables advanced, Luis Guillermo Solís became more consolidated in first place, to the surprise of many and the euphoria of his followers.

The PAC got 30.64% of the votes, the PLN 29.71%, the Broad Front 17.25% and the ML 11.34%. The biggest winner, however, didn’t appear on the ballot: in a figure very similar to 2010, 31.81% of eligible voters abstained.

How the Legislative
Assembly came out

The make-up of the Legislative Assembly was also unexpected. The most outstanding feature was that the Broad Front won 9 seats, the first time in Costa Rica’s political history that a leftist party had pulled so many seats. Moreover, the majority of those elected on its ticket are from social movements. The Broad Front succeeded in attracting the votes of people who haven’t traditionally sided with the Left.

The PLN only won 18 seats, 6 less than its outgoing administration. The PUSC made a bit of a comeback, increasing its number from 5 to 8, while the Right represented by the Libertarian Movement went in the opposite direction: from 8 to 5. The PAC also increased its seats, from 11 to 13. Special attention will have to be paid to the structure of the Assembly for the coming four years. Parliamentary pluralism will require major negotiating capacities, leadership and alliances to overcome the resentments generated during the electoral campaign, especially between the PAC and the Broad Front.

Women: The biggest abstainers

Little has been said about the role of women in the analyses of these elections. None of the 13 presidential candidates was a woman, evidencing the continuation of electoral dynamics dominated by gender disparity.

Many would say that the absence of women running for President was due to the regrettable performance of Laura Chinchilla, which annulled the possibility that the country would accept another woman at the head of government, at least so soon. Others have said time will be needed to “forget” the President’s failures and reestablish trust, as if what was bad about the outgoing government can be reduced to the President’s feminine condition and not the pillaging and elitist tendencies of the traditional political class, which in Costa Rica as everywhere else has historically been dominated by men.

It was noticeable, for example, how in the PAC’s first open convention, attended by only 23,500 people, Epsy Campbell, the only woman candidate in the party primaries, came in last against three men even though she was the best known given her history as a legislator and having been a vice presidential candidate previously. Did the fact that she was a woman carry weight in that vote? Probably. In the final count, the advantage went to Luis Guillermo Solís, who got 72 votes more than the first runner-up.

Without taking opinions
or demands into account

The media carried very few of the opinions of active women members of the political parties, although they very probably put the most energy into the campaign, visiting communities, chairing meetings, organizing events, knocking on doors and attending the least visible but most indispensable arenas to activate voters. Still less attention was paid in the debates to women’s specific demands, even though women represent virtually half of the electoral rolls. But there was no lack of analyses of the style and fashions of the female vice presidential candidates, with La Nación going as far as to provide us with a double-page spread on this crucial topic.

All parties, without distinction, demonstrated their stinginess about sharing leadership with women or highlighting women’s leadership and capacities in their own ranks. And if a woman took her own initiative in that regard, she was put down, especially if she expressed differing criteria from men well known in the media scene.

The debates were a stage to test out male disputes, with the scant invitations to women to analyze the electoral moment demonstrating how far we still are from equitable political participation. Yet again we saw a “soccer-culture” style campaign in which men seek the opinion of other men, considering their opinion the most qualified. The most distressing aspect is that all of this transpired without the majority of us women being clearly aware of this permanent form of exclusion in what has come to be called a “democratic fiesta.”

On February 21, women representatives were elected for only 19 of the 57 seats open in the new Legislative Assembly, three less than in Chinchilla’s administration. In other words, barely a third went to women. More troubling still is the fact that the elected representatives include at least five men who will stridently appeal to I don’t know what god to try to decide on sexual and reproductive health issues that profoundly affect women, not to mention the other men who will support those positions, although without raising so much dust in the process.

PLN: On to the second round

In preparing for April 6, the PLN did what it knows how to do best: ally with the conservative wing of the clergy and evangelical leaders to attack the PAC on issues such as abortion and legalization of same-sex unions. In fact, the evangelicals made a pact with the PLN to recommend that their faithful vote for Araya. According to them, Araya is a “committed Christian” while the PAC is looking to turn Costa Rica into an atheist country.

Another advantage for the PLN is its machinery, which no other party in Costa Rica can even come close to. Its capacity to mobilize voters, its clientelism among the country’s most removed and impoverished sectors and the possibility of appealing to the traditional Liberationist vote are activities it has always prioritized and would prioritize again.

The Broad Front’s late founder, José Merino, had already noted this with great acuity in past elections, when a journalist commented to him that he had noted a big presence of PAC sympathizers in the streets on election day. Marino quickly responded: “This means National Liberation is going to win. It’s always the same story: the other parties go around making a ruckus in the streets on voting day, while the Liberationists roll up their sleeves and go to work getting their sympathizers out of their houses and taking them to vote. They’re experts in getting votes because they have a well-oiled machine. When will the other parties learn the lesson?”

PAC: Toward victory?

Approaching April 6, Luis Guillermo Solís continued displaying his conciliatory, reflexive tone, sounding like the change the country needs, always trying to occupy the middle ground, presenting himself as “the common Tico.” His publicity messages have been extremely well thought through, exceeding all opponents in quality, without forgetting that he had economic resources derived from the debt the other “alternative” options, such as the Broad Front, didn’t possess.

The PAC was able to integrate key figures from other parties, some more controversial than others, into its campaign logic, being extremely careful to avoid being associated with the Broad Front. Now facing the second round, the PAC and the Broad Front were expected to come closer together, but it didn’t happen. A sector of the Broad Front interpreted it as a snub and Villalta announced that his followers were free to vote for whomever they chose, which was totally unexpected given that the common aim of both parties was to get the PLN out of power. When the results were announced that left him out of the second round, Villalta included an unforgettable phrase in his speech: “The second round will be between the Right that steals and the Right that doesn’t.”

As the winner on February 2, the PAC had faced two choices: either try to obtain the backing of the Broad Front, negotiating with it to attract its voters on the second round, or distance itself to avoid being associated with the communist specter that had so influenced the first-round results. Solís and his team opted for the second choice. They surely calculated that, motivated by the desire to get the PLN out of power, most of the Broad Front’s supporters would risk a lot by abstaining on April 6 with or without the Front’s endorsement of the PAC. That assumption became clear in the first voter intention poll prior to the second round.

Surprise: Araya withdraws

The projections in the poll published on March 5 were another surprise. Conducted by the Center for Political Research and Studies of the University of Costa Rica (UCR) for the weekly magazine Universidad, the main finding was the solid advantage Solís and the PAC enjoyed among all voters who weren’t PLN supporters. Voting intentions for the second round were overwhelming: 64.4% would vote for Solís and only 20.9% for Araya, with 14.7% not responding.

Based on these results, a rumor that Johnny Araya would withdraw from the campaign began to gather momentum and was confirmed at noon on March 5. Two other factors on top of the UCR poll data may have influenced his decision. One was the PLN’s squandering of money on electoral propaganda in the first round, leaving it without funds for the second round. The other was the party’s own internal polls, whose results convinced the PLN structure to take the strategic precaution of avoiding even greater erosion should the PAC win by a landslide on April 6, giving its government tremendous popular legitimacy.

Emotion and caution characterize what happened after what is presumably the last in this chain of surprises. As there is no constitutional provision for a party to withdraw its candidacy for the second round, both candidates will be on the ballot and all Costa Ricans eligible to vote may do so for whichever of the two. In effect, all that has happened is that Johnny Araya stopped running for President.

Solís and the PAC:
An enormous challenge

Voters must be clear that the presidential elections are truly decided on April 6 through the ballot box. The PAC shouldn’t fall into the temptation of premature triumphalism. As Patricia Mora, the first legislative representative elected for the Broad Front for San José, pointed out, what has already been demonstrated by this chain of surprises is a clear trend against political business as usual.

New winds are blowing. Whoever ends up governing will have to rebuild good governance. Solís and his party are at the threshold of that enormous challenge.

Karina Fonseca Vindas is a social communicator and director of the Jesuit Service for Migrants in Costa Rica.

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