Next President Will Need Negotiating Skills
Oscar Arias or Ottón Solís will have to rely heavily on negotiating skills to govern, given that no party will hold an absolute majority in Congress.

The winner has yet to be announced, as the Tribunal Supremo de Elecciones (TSE) continues the manual count, which is expected be the end of the month.

Former president Oscar Arias (1986-1990) of the Partido Liberación Nacional (PLN) and economist Ottón Solís of the Partido Acción Cuidadana (PAC) are waiting out the vote counting because the electronic voting placed the difference between them at less than 4.000 votes.

According to the last official report released before the recount was ordered last week, Arias captured 40.51 percent of the vote in the Feb. 5 election compared to 40.29 percent for Solís.

But no matter which candidate wins, they will have to deal with a largely hostile Congress.

In the legislative elections, held simultaneously, the PLN took 25 seats in Congress, PAC won 18, six went to the Movimiento Libertario (ML), four went to the governing Partiod Unidad Social Cristiana(PUSC), and four went to small independent parties.

Political experts say that the election outcome has transformed Costa Rica from a two-party system, in which PLN and PUSC administrations have differed more in terms of style than content and alternated power for many years,

Disillusioned by this system, many voters chose to throw their support behind an emerging force, Solís's PAC, which has attempted to mark its distance from the prevailing social and economic policies, he added.

Solís campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, pledging to pay more attention to ethics in the public administration, the correct use of public resources, and a greater commitment to small companies and the domestic market.

Luis Antonio Sobrado, of the TSE, warns that the figures arising from the manual count should not be mixed with the results of the initial electronic vote count.

Rodrigo Arias, the PLN campaign director and brother of the presidential candidate, had announced on Thursday that the combined results of the manual and electronic counts had given his party a lead of over 10,000 votes.

But Oscar Fonseca, the president of the TSE, called on the political parties to refrain from declaring a winner before the final result is announced. He also asked the public to be patient. In accordance with Costa Rican law, the TSE has until March 17 to issue a definitive decision.

In any event, whoever becomes Costa Rica's next president will have been elected with the least public support in the country's history, since he will have been put in office by just slightly over 25 percent of eligible voters.

The free trade agreement signed between the United States, Central America and the Dominican Republic, known as CAFTA (TLC - Tratado Libre de Comercio - locally), was one of the central issues in these elections, since Costa Rica is the only country that has not yet ratified the trade pact.

There is virtually no chance that CAFTA will be ratified by the current administration, since the head of the congressional foreign affairs committee, ruling party lawmaker Rolando Laclé, has stated that debate on the trade pact will not resume until the final results of the general elections are known. That means a decision will be left up to the incoming government, which will take office on May 8.

Albino Vargas, secretary-general of the National Association of Public Employees, Costa Rica's largest trade union, said that attempting to ratify CAFTA before the change in government would threaten social upheaval in this Central American nation, given that this is an issue that has clearly polarised Costa Rican society.