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.

Corruption, however, ran rampant through the government and the Calderonista party; the PVP sharply criticized but never broke with it. Civil war erupted in the aftermath of the 1948 election, which was declared fraudulent by the governing parties after thousands of their supporters were prevented from voting. Roughly 2,000 people died in the ensuing conflict. The victors, led by José Figueres, formed a junta, which immediately reneged on an agreement with the PVP to respect the rights of unions and party members. The party was outlawed, and the labour movement crushed. The junta did however respect the Social Guarantees. It also nationalized the banks and utilities, expanded the national health service and welfare programmes, enacted female suffrage, extended rights to Afro-Costa Ricans and abolished the army. In 1951, Figueres founded the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN), a sui generis social democratic party which would go on to dominate the country’s postwar politics. It differed from its European counterparts in that it had little support from the labour movement; unions only regained strength on the banana plantations and in the much-expanded public sector: successive PLN governments promoted a mixed economy model, with state agencies and the number of public employees growing exponentially. Poverty dropped significantly, from close to 50 per cent in the 1950s to under 25 per cent by 1977; infant mortality decreased by more than 70 per cent over the same period.

By the turn of the 1980s, however, neoliberal-influenced politicians inside and outside the PLN began to question the mixed model, arguing that the state sector was on an unsustainable footing, financed by external debt. Rising interest rates and falling commodity prices soon combined to produce a severe economic crisis, and the government in San José was forced to make deals with the IMF and the World Bank to acquire fresh funds. Over the next two decades, IMF-imposed structural adjustment policies saw reductions in tariffs and duties, and the privatization of various state enterprises. An export-promotion strategy successfully attracted foreign direct investment, beginning with non-traditional agricultural exports and then expanding to high-tech industries in the newly established Free Trade Zones. International investment spurred the development of a significant tourist industry. In 2007, the signing of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) with the United States was approved by a razor-thin majority in a plebiscite.

The finely balanced referendum revealed how polarized Costa Rican society had become, as had the presidential election the year before, in which the PLN’s Óscar Arias defeated Ottón Solís of the centre-left Partido Acción Ciudadana (PAC) by just 1 per cent. Founded by Solís, who had abandoned the PLN in 1998 due to its neoliberal makeover, the PAC would go onto break the dominance of the two main political parties – the PLN and the Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC), both of which were tarnished by their association with IMF liberalization. The PAC won the 2014 election and was re-elected in 2018. But it too shifted to the right, reviving the neoliberal agenda that had discredited its rivals. During the pandemic, the PAC government managed to pass a series of laws that had previously been blocked by social movements, especially public sector unions: an anti-strike law, a regressive tax reform, the quasi-constitutional elevation of a tax law that caps public spending and the freezing of state employee salaries. This formed the context for the 2022 election, in which voters dramatically rejected the party, which failed to win a single seat.

The PPSO’s dramatic rise can be seen in part as a bicoastal revolt against an economic model which has privileged tourism and high-tech development within the Free Trade Zones. Tourism has flourished in the coastal provinces of Limón, Puntarenas and Guanacaste, a bonanza for international hotel chains. But the economic benefits have been meagre for most of the local population, who are largely dependent on informal work. The contemporary condition of labour on the coasts – disorganized and exploited – contrasts starkly with the previous era, when banana plantations were a major component of the national economy and their workers the backbone of the labour movement. Major strikes took place on the Caribbean coast in 1934 and on the Pacific coast in 1955, 1959 and 1984. But African palm steadily began to replace banana farming – likely at least in part due to worker militancy – employing far fewer and more atomized labourers.  Companies developed a repertoire of aggressive tactics, including the harassment and dismissal of union members, the hiring of undocumented migrants, and the use of labour contractors to forestall collective bargaining. As a result, unions have virtually disappeared.

It is precisely in these areas that Fernández achieved overwhelming electoral success. In the 31 cantons that make up the San José metropolitan area, the PPSO fared worse, sometimes losing out to the PLN. But in the rest of the country, Fernández obtained 60 per cent of the vote – up to 70 per cent in some places – sweeping the coastal provinces. According to one study, the PPSO won in the ten cantons with the lowest income, while the PLN, led by Álvaro Ramos Chaves, won in the ten with the highest. Voters also appear to be split by education level and form of employment, following patterns familiar elsewhere. Further studies are needed, but it seems that much of the anti-PPSO vote came from those who work in the formal economy and have benefitted from some post-secondary education. By contrast many of those who voted for the PPSO work in the informal sector – close to 40 per cent of the labour force – and often do not have a high school diploma.

It is understandable that Chaves’s tirades against corruption and luxury pensions appealed to these voters. In a confrontational style that increasingly resonates throughout the Americas, he assails members of the political and intellectual elite as enemies of ‘the people’ – notwithstanding the fact that he himself lives in a mansion and made his fortune at the World Bank. The narrative does important ideological work: the structural differences between the two economies that exist in the country are obscured. Instead of addressing the extreme levels of income inequality in Costa Rica – among the highest in Latin America – the PPSO directs popular ire against public sector workers and the universities.

Fernández also benefited from the country’s powerful religious movements. Some 20 per cent of the population is evangelical, and between 50 and 60 per cent are Catholics. Both churches have come out strongly against same-sex marriage, sex education in schools and abortion, as did the PPSO. Like Chaves, Fernández consistently refers to religion in speeches and – though a Catholic herself – obtained significant support from evangelical pastors. Many voters were also evidently reassured by the PPSO’s planned Bukele-style crackdown on organized crime; the government is constructing a $35 million maximum security prison, modelled on El Salvador’s notorious CECOT penitentiary. In many ways the PPSO has followed the authoritarian script that has guided the right to victory across much of the continent. The common conditions have been high levels of public anxiety about crime and anger about corruption, as well as about the failure of previous administrations to significantly improve living standards.

If Fernández pulls off an authoritarian clampdown on crime, it is possible that the appeal of the PPSO will endure. Yet Fernández has committed to fiscal discipline and the paring down public debt, which would keep public salaries and pensions frozen and do little to alleviate the crises in healthcare and education. Such austerity risks alienating voters, which may provide a political opening for the opposition. Since the elections the PLN and the moderate left-wing party Frente Amplio (FA) have formed an informal popular front. The opposition parties hold more than two-fifths of the seats in the Assembly, which could stymie the PPSO’s planned constitutional changes and its proposed suspension of individual rights in high crime areas. To mobilize a real opposition, however, they will have to reactivate the trade union and farmers’ movements, and reconnect with the workers in the informal economy in the impoverished barrios and on the coasts.

Read on: Martín Mosquera, ‘The Meaning of Milei’, NLR 155.