Fernández Wins Costa Rica’s Presidency in First-Round Landslide, Cementing Latin America’s Rightward Shift
KEY POINTS
- Laura Fernández, 39, won with roughly 48.5% of the vote in a 20-candidate field, avoiding a runoff and handing her Sovereign People’s Party an absolute majority of 31 out of 57 legislative seats.
- The election was dominated by an unprecedented security crisis: homicides surged 38% in 2023 to an all-time record, criminal organizations grew tenfold in a decade, and Costa Rica evolved from a quiet cocaine transit point into a logistics hub for Mexican, Colombian, and European cartels.
- Fernández has pledged to finish a $35 million mega-prison modeled on El Salvador’s CECOT, declare states of emergency in crime zones, and appoint outgoing President Rodrigo Chaves to her cabinet — drawing both praise for decisiveness and alarm over democratic erosion.
(Analysis) Laura Fernández Delgado, a 39-year-old political scientist born in the coastal province of Puntarenas, will become Costa Rica’s 50th president when she takes office on May 8.
With 93.79% of ballots counted by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, she held approximately 48.5% of the vote — comfortably clearing the 40% threshold required to avoid an April runoff.
Her nearest rival, centrist economist Álvaro Ramos of the National Liberation Party, trailed at roughly 33.3% and conceded five hours into the count.
Former first lady Claudia Dobles, running on a progressive platform built around environmental policy and infrastructure, finished a distant third near 5%.
Turnout reached 69.1%, reversing a decade-long decline and jumping over nine points from the record-low participation of 2022. The result is inseparable from the security catastrophe that has reshaped Costa Rican politics at extraordinary speed.
A country that abolished its military in 1948 and long cultivated an image as the Switzerland of Central America recorded 907 homicides in 2023 — a 38% spike from the previous year — followed by 880 in 2024 and roughly 873 in 2025.
Costa Rica Crime and Political Shift
Criminal organizations operating on Costa Rican soil ballooned from 35 to 340 over the past decade, according to Security Minister Mario Zamora.
European port authorities have seized at least 88 tons of cocaine originating from the country since 2019, and in late 2025 authorities dismantled what they labeled Costa Rica’s first transnational cartel, seizing 14 tons of drugs and 68 weapons.
Polling showed that 40% of voters named security as their top concern, up from just 4% in 2022. Fernández, who served as Chaves’s planning minister and later chief of staff, ran explicitly as his continuity candidate.
In her victory speech she declared the country’s post-1948 “Second Republic” finished and vowed to build a “Third Republic” through deep and irreversible change.
Her program centers on completing a 5,100-inmate maximum-security prison inspired by El Salvador’s CECOT — ground was broken in January with President Bukele present — alongside states of emergency in high-crime areas, mandatory prison labor, and stricter sentencing.
Costa Rica Economic and Political Outlook
On the economy, she has promised to expand public-private partnerships, attract foreign investment, and cut bureaucratic barriers, while poverty dropped from 18% to 15.2% under Chaves but inequality remains among the worst in Latin America.
For the left and centrist opposition, the outcome is alarming. Ramos warned that modern dictatorships do not arrive with tanks, and Dobles — who will serve as a legislator in the new congress — spoke of exhaustion with the government’s confrontational tone.
With the PPSO’s leap from 8 to 31 assembly seats, three parties were entirely eliminated from the legislature. Critics note that Chaves repeatedly clashed with the judiciary, the electoral tribunal, and the press, and fear Fernández will deepen that pattern.
Rights groups point to El Salvador, where over 90,000 people have been detained since 2022, many of them likely innocent.
For the right and those who back the Chaves project, Fernández embodies democratic accountability: voters chose continuity with open eyes and a historically high turnout. Bukele was the first leader to call and congratulate her.
Her supporters argue that the traditional political class failed to protect citizens from cartels like the Sinaloa-linked networks now confirmed to have used Costa Rica as a transit point, and that decisive action justifies extraordinary tools.
Whether she can deliver security without dismantling the democratic institutions that made Costa Rica exceptional remains the defining question of her presidency — and a test case the rest of Latin America is watching closely.
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