A Guide to the 2022 Costa Rican General Election: All You Need to Know

Costa Ricans are heading to a general election in less than a month. The voting is scheduled for Sunday, February 6, 2022, but it is unlikely that a winner will be announced then, since presidential candidates must reach a minimum of 40% of the vote to get the public office. Because of that, a second-round will be held almost certainly, and the top two contenders from the first one will have two extra months to convince voters that they’re fit for the position before a final ballot takes place on April 3, 2022.

Nevertheless, the first round will have some winners. The February 6, 2022, ballot is both presidential and legislative. So, even if no presidential candidate wins, the next Chamber representatives will be elected on that day. This part of the election is as important as the presidential voting, since the Asamblea Legislativa (“Legislative Assembly” in Spanish) has been increasingly polarized in the past four years, which has eroded consensus and led to the impossibility of approving urgent laws concerning the economic recovery. There are signs that this might get worse in the next period.

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A crowded ballot

A whopping total of 26 candidates aspire to the presidential office, the biggest number of runners ever. Of those 26 presidential contenders, 14 have a double candidacy — meaning that they are also on the deputee ballot. That being so, if they don’t win the presidential election, those 14 candidates still have the option of winning seats in the Asamblea Legislativa. There are also parties that only present their candidates for certain provinces, and parties that only opt for the legislative ballot and not the presidential one. In total, there are 38 registered parties to this election, and that will probably increase polarization in the next legislative period.

Either way, Costa Ricans are still not sure about what to do with this considerate number of candidates. Polls in the last months have shown that the undecided are the biggest group. More than any candidate, the “I don’t know” answer is the one that has more support in every survey. The trend is that more than half of the statistic samples is made up of undecided voters, so we can virtually say that more than half of the voters still have no idea about what to do on February 6.

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Anything can happen

In that same sense, no candidate has more than 20% of support in the surveys, which means that no one has the chance to win the first round. José María Figueres, who was president between 1994 and 1998, and who represents the National Liberation Party (PLN, its acronym in Spanish), has been leading the polls in the last few months, but his popularity has become stagnant while Lineth Saborío, the candidate for Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC in Spanish) has been on the rise. These two parties were the protagonists of the country’s bipartisan era, which ended back in 2010 when Citizen’s Action Party (PAC) won its first election.

But after two consecutive governments, it seems like PAC will be heading out of Casa Presidencial after this election. Its presidential candidate, Welmer Ramos, is not even in the top 5 in the polls. Besides Figueres and Saborío, the other candidates that have good numbers in surveys are Fabricio Alvardo (from the New Republic party), José María Villalta (Broad Front) and Rodrigo Chaves (Social Democratic Progress). But the numbers are so tight that it’s impossible to guess who is going to be in the second round.

The next weeks will make everything more clear, but it’s important to remember that the last two presidents (Luis Guillermo Solís and Carlos Alvarado, both PAC candidates) were pretty low on the polls when they were campaigning, so we should not rule out any surprise.

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