From Sidecar
On 1 February, Laura Fernández of the ruling Partido Pueblo Soberano won the national elections in Costa Rica by a landslide. With 48 per cent of the vote, the PPSO enters the new parliament with 31 of 57 seats, a majority that no party has achieved since 1982. Founded in 2022, the PPSO is a caudillo-centred right-wing party organized around the personality of outgoing president Rodrigo Chaves Robles. A virtual unknown in the country prior to his election, Chaves swept aside the established parties in 2022 with his populist approach, originally running for the Partido Progreso Social Democrático (PPSD); in power he railed against other branches of government, the opposition, the press and the universities in weekly sessions at the presidential palace broadcast on state television. Considered a regional outlier due to its stable democracy and welfare system, Costa Rica appears to be falling in line with wider trends – the PPSO’s ascendancy the latest in a succession of right-wing victories in Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Honduras.
How to explain the PPSO’s formidable triumph? During her victory speech, 39-year-old Fernández lauded her mentor as the architect of a new Costa Rica. Chaves’s administration focused on fiscal discipline and macroeconomic stability, keeping inflation low and the local currency strong. In July 2025, the World Bank officially upgraded Costa Rica from an upper-middle-income to a high-income country. Chaves’s protégée likely benefited from the recent run of strong growth: GDP increased by some 5 per cent in 2025, largely driven by 15 per cent growth in the Free Trade Zones concentrated in the country’s Central Valley, hubs of medical device manufacturing and tech services. The broader picture is more mixed, however. There has been a steep rise in organized crime and homicides; persistent deflation has impacted local consumption and investment. Though poverty has decreased, this has occurred alongside a decline in labour force participation. Meanwhile public education is in crisis, with teachers’ salaries and pensions frozen, and the health system is tottering.
Fernández’s popularity can perhaps be best understood in the context of a longer re-composition of Costa Rica’s social and political landscape. A country slightly smaller than West Virginia with a population of 5.2 million, its welfare system is a legacy of the early 1940s, when President Calderón Guardia of the National Republican Party (PRN) established the Universidad de Costa Rica, a national health insurance system (the Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social or CCSS) and passed a suite of pro-labour constitutional reforms known as the Social Guarantees. The Partido Vanguardia Popular (PVP) – the successor to the Communist Party, founded in 1931 – backed the administration and mobilized thousands of workers in support of a Labour Code that included a minimum wage, unemployment insurance and the right to organize unions. This alliance was a boon to the labour movement which by the mid-1940s had organized nearly 20 per cent of the workforce, with its main bases in the banana plantations on the coasts and among artisanal workers.
David Díaz-Arias is professor of history and director of the Center for Central American Historical Studies at the Universidad de Costa Rica.
Jeffrey Gould is an American historian, currently the Distinguished Professor at Indiana University. His work focuses on Central American social movements, ethnic conflicts, and political violence.
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