2014 Election Blog: Winning Costa Rican Candidate Marks Break with Two-Party System

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The Citizens’ Action Party’s Luis Guillermo Solís became the first president elected in decades to hail from outside the country’s two dominant parties.

On April 6, the Citizens’ Action Party Luis Guillermo Solís won Costa Rica’s presidential runoff, earning around 1.31 million votes in a one-man race. Last month, the ruling National Liberation Party’s presidential candidate Johnny Araya announced he would discontinue his campaign in the face of poor poll numbers. Constitutionally, Araya’s name had to remain on the ballot, and he won more than 373,000 votes. Given the one-horse race, Solís had called for at least a million votes to cement his mandate.

According to preliminary numbers from the country’s electoral authorities, Solís won around 78 percent of the vote, while Araya won 22 percent. At the beginning of this year, Solís had been polling fourth, though he gained the largest number of votes during the first-round election. Meanwhile, on Sunday abstention stood at 43 percent, a historic record since 1953. The vote had another historic element: Solís managed to break the two-party system that had dominated the country for decades. His election marked the first time since the 1960s that Costa Ricans elected someone from outside the two dominant parties—the National Liberation Party and the Social Christian Unity Party.

AS/COA Online takes a look at some of the tweets from election day.