Costa Rican 2022 Election Update: This is the Newly Elected Congress

On February 6, 2022, Costa Ricans elected their new Legislative Assembly (the name given to its Congress), which will be composed of 57 representatives belonging to six different political parties. Meanwhile, the political campaign goes on, as the presidential candidates José María Figueres (from PLN) and Rodrigo Chaves (PSD) are heading for a run-off election on April 3rd.

The new Costa Rican Congress is in theory less fragmented than the current one, which has seven political fractions linked to political parties and an independent group consisting of deputies who left their parties after the start of the legislative term. Now, there are six partisan fractions but it could happen again that after the legislative period term starts some representatives quit their parties to join the group of independents.

The parties that won seats in Congress are PLN (which stands for National Liberation Party in Spanish), with 18 representatives; PUSC (Social Christian Unity Party), with 11 representatives; PSD (Social Democratic Progress), with 9 representatives; PNR (New Republic Party), with 7 representatives; and PLP (Liberal Progressive Party) and FA (Broad Front) with 6 representatives each.

Three of those parties are new in Congress: PSD, PNR, and PLP. Although PNR is not fully considered a new party, since its the most recent platform of two-times presidential candidate Fabricio Alvarado, who won the first round of the 2018 election but lost the run-off election to now President Carlos Alvarado, from the Citizens’ Action Party (PAC). After Fabricio lost, his old party broke ranks with him and he founded PNR.

However, the most impressive novelty of the next Legislative Assembly is that PAC, the party that governed during the last 8 years, has now disappeared from Congress. Not only did its presidential candidate got less than 1% support in the election, but also none of its candidates for the Legislative Assembly won a seat, the first time that has happened since the party’s inception in the year 2000. This is for sure a disruptive issue in the Costa Rican political landscape of the 21st century.

No other radical changes were detected after this legislative election. PLN remains to be the biggest fraction of Congress, as has happened after the last five elections, independently of their presidential election results. PUSC –which alongside PLN was a protagonist of the country’s bipartisan era that ended in 2014 with PAC’s first election win– won three more seats this time. And FA, the only left-wing party in Congress, went from having just one representative to six.

The voter turnout for the legislative elections was 63,2%, more than the 59,7% turnout of the presidential election that was held that same day. This means that more people voted for the preferred members of Congress than for a presidential candidate.

The best known names of the new Legislative Assembly

We don’t know yet who’s going to be the President of Costa Rica after May 1st, when the new administration should begin. But we do know who won seats for Congress, so let’s review the best known names of the six parties that will control the Legislative power during the next period.

Rodrigo Arias (PLN): Lawyer and former Minister of the Presidency of Costa Rica during the first (1986-1990) and second (2006-2010) governments of his brother, former President Óscar Arias. That Ministry is in charge of coordinating the relationships between the central government and the Legislative Assembly. He was an important figure during the campaign of the referendum about Costa Rica’s signing of NAFTA in 2007 and during Óscar Arias’ last government he got into heated discussions with then journalist Pilar Cisneros, who also won a seat for next Congress.

Carlos Felipe Garcia (PUSC): A 25 year-old political scientist, Carlos Felipe García Molina was deputy candidate number one of PUSC for the San José province. He was a pro bono adviser for PUSC during the legislative period between 2014 and 2018. “I come from a rural area, I know the reality they face and it is necessary that public institutions respond to the particular ones of each region. We must guarantee an efficient State and make the decisions that are most urgent for the country,” he said in an interview in December 2021.

Pilar Cisneros (PSD): One of the most well-known journalists of the country, Pilar Cisneros until 15 months ago always vowed to never become a politician because after many years of critical reporting of power she understood politics to be a corruption nest. Something happened in 2021 that made her change her mind, because she publicly supported the almost unknown former Finance Minister Rodrigo Chaves in his presidential aspirations. Many political scientists believe that one of the main reasons that Chaves is now heading to the run-off election was because of Cisneros’ support, and she doesn’t close the door to quit the Legislative Assembly if he wins, in order to join his government.

Fabricio Alvarado (PNR): A two-times presidential candidate and one-time representative of Congress, Fabricio Alvarado is the leader of a political movement linked to Pentecostalism and Christian churches that has been brewing in the country for the last couple of decades. He will now lead his party, New Republic, as it officially joins the Legislative Assembly. “We will fight for the people who have not seen answers for years, we will fight and raise our voices in favor of those who have been ignored by governments for years,” he said after the February 6 election.

Eliécer Feinzaig (PLP): As was the case with Fabricio Alvarado, Eliécer Feinzaig ran both for president and for member of Congress. He is now an elected deputy, after many years working as an economist and having tribunes in the largest media in the country, in which he used to criticize the economic measures of the PAC governments. He was part of the PUSC government between 1998 and 2002. Because of a controversy during that government, in 2009 he was disqualified from public office for five years.

Sofía Guillén (FA): One of the fiercest critical voices of what she calls neoliberal politics of the last governments, the economist Sofía Guillén will likely lead the FA fraction of the new Congress. She was critical of President Carlos Alvarado’s tax measures during his four years in the government and became a mediatic opponent of this administration. She has worked as advisor for the United Nations and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, and has taught economics at the University of Costa Rica.