Close election in Costa Rica

[ag]

My hunch is, this is the churchy influence: the bishops have come out against Arias, who is too rightist for them (he is a run-of-the-mill moderate pro-trade liberal, in the international sense of the word). Sad - he was and would be a great president.

[ag]

Edit to that:
They're both center-left, actually. Arias runs for the PLN, the traditional social-democratic party in Costa Rica. In the House elections (pr ... I think), they're polling 36%. Solis is running for a fairly new party and is running largely on a platform of opposition to CAFTA. His party is taking about 25%. The third placed candidate at about 8% is a Libertarian, by the way, while the traditional centre-right party's (to which the current president belongs) candidate is polling at under 4% - and the party is polling at no more than about twice that.


Ah, interesting, ag. Arias does seem to be winning, just by a tiny margin. (I *think* there's no runoff, might be wrong.)

There is a run-off, as far as I know.

Arias is, of course, not a rightist in the traditional Lat.Am. sense - he is a moderate liberal, and he wants to ratify CAFTA (something that should be a no-brainer for Costa-Ricans, especially given that all the others have, but somehow it has become controversial).  Arias is also not anti-American. I guess, a lot of people in the Church don't like that.

Not ratifying CAFTA, given that the neighbors have, would be ruinous for Costa Rica; trying to renegotiate it would mean to do this from a hugely disadvantageous position (US does not really care if Costa Rica is in or not - this would be dumber than the NYC Transit Union's negotiating tactics).

[ag]

BBC reports that the full count actually gives a reasonable lead to Arias. According to the full results Arias has 40.9% (+0.4% compared with the incomplete preliminary count) and Solis has 39.8% (-0.4%). This is still close, but not indistinguishable. These results are complete, but not final yet: Solis is asserting irregularities, etc. The Electoral Tribunal still has the old preliminary results and a big scared pop-up on the front page, refuting all sorts of rumors and allegations.  Seems like things are still tense. Stay tuned.

[ag]

Solis has conceded. Arias wil be president.