What Is Rodriguismo?

Rodrigo Chaves came to power in 2022 presenting himself as an outsider who promised to govern “for the people” and confront political and economic elites. His administration combined a populist political style — marked by vulgar and confrontational rhetoric — with technocratic economic policies. This posture quickly caused tensions with the political establishment and the press, a conflict he relished.

Substantively, there was little to differentiate Chaves’s political and economic agenda from that of the technocratic right that has sought to dismantle the remnants of the Costa Rican welfare state since the 1980s. The difference, however, lay in his approach. While these groups had sought to advance such changes gradually and, at least discursively, within the confines of the rule of law, Chaves followed a more aggressive logic, hewing closer to the motto of “move fast and break things,” an approach championed by various far-right leaders who have come to be known colloquially as the “Chainsaw International.” His administration launched frontal attacks against what it described as institutional “barriers” to efficiency, including Congress, the public bureaucracy, and the system of checks and balances itself, which he accused of protecting narrow interests and of limiting the executive’s capacity to act quickly and decisively.

These rhetorical flourishes masked a deeply mediocre government. Few of its flagship initiatives were translated into law, and many of its proposed structural transformations were derailed amid institutional resistance. Yet these failures did little to weaken Chaves’s political standing, because his popular appeal was less grounded in concrete policy achievements than in permanent confrontation with the two-party order that had dominated Costa Rica for much of the previous six decades. For Chaves, it was politically preferable to fail loudly and blame “captured” institutions and “corrupt elites” than to negotiate with the opposition and risk appearing complicit with the very system he claimed to oppose.

The administration’s economic approach, centered on foreign investment, macroeconomic stability, and improvements to the business climate, yielded mixed results. While it brought modest economic growth, much of the labor force remained alarmingly informal, poverty and inequality remained high, and the cost of living continued to creep upward. This precarity was exacerbated by Chaves’s constant attacks on nearly all aspects of the country’s famed welfare state, a strikingly conventional hallmark of his project. Spending on education fell, exacerbating inequalities between public and private schools and urban and rural areas; public universities were targeted with cuts; and the health care system was significantly underfunded, leading to staff shortages and deepening inequalities in access to care.

Adding to the population’s precarity was the administration’s broader patriarchal onslaught in the realm of gender politics. Chaves engaged in frequent conflicts over sexual education and “gender ideology,” restricted access to abortion and reproductive health services, and showed little interest in confronting the growing number of femicides. These policies, as well as Chaves’s own history of sexual harassment as a World Bank employee, served to normalize gender-based violence within the broader political project.

The End of the Second Republic

Fresh off of her victory, Fernández made clear that her desire to continue the project of rodriguismo was no mere campaign ploy. She has since been reappointed by Chaves as minister of the presidency, a position she will hold until assuming the presidency, and signaled that she may appoint him to the same post in her administration. She has also pledged to deepen the country’s economic growth through reforms akin to those passed by Chaves, taken a similar confrontational stance to the country’s institutions in calling for the resignation of the comptroller general, and parroted similar positions on gender and reproductive rights, including explicitly equating abortion with murder.

Fernández seeks to deepen her predecessor’s project. In her victory speech, she claimed that her election marked a “profound and irreversible change” that had ushered in the end of the Second Republic and the beginning of a Third Republic. The Second Republic — rooted in the political settlement following the Civil War of 1948 and the constitution of 1949 — has long symbolized the institutional foundations of Costa Rica’s social democratic model, including strong checks and balances, an expanded role for the state, and universal access to education and health care. By declaring its end, Fernández actively challenged the legitimacy of that flawed yet stable institutional architecture, recasting oversight and separation of powers as inefficiencies that constrain decisive governance.

What will become of this supposed Third Republic is yet to be seen. The PPSO obtained a simple majority in Congress with thirty-one deputies, the largest legislative bloc since 1982, and massively outperformed its opposition. Nevertheless, it fell short of the thirty-eight votes required to enact constitutional reforms, declare a state of emergency, suspend individual rights, or block the reelection of members of the Constitutional Court — powers that the incoming administration has openly signaled its intention to pursue. The government may be aided in its quest to push these reforms by appealing to voters’ sense of insecurity, a relatively new phenomenon in Costa Rican politics that played an outsize role in the election.

The Specter of (In)Security

Since the 2000s, security has become a central issue in the Central American political landscape. The “democratic transitions” of the 1990s were intertwined with neoliberal reforms that deepened inequality and concentrated wealth; by the early 2000s, organized crime began to play a larger role, taking advantage of this precarity and expanding the drug trade. Rather than addressing the underlying social conditions of insecurity, most Central American governments embraced mano dura (“iron first”) policies of militarization and mass incarceration.

Costa Rica avoided mano dura but not its logic: security policy hardened through civilian punitive measures that narrowed democratic space rather than addressing the roots of violence. During the 2000s, rising petty crime created incentives to judicialize insecurity. The introduction of fast-track courts in 2009, presented as a response to an inefficient justice system, produced a sharp increase in the prison population. As a result, Costa Rica now ranks twenty-second globally in prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants and holds the third-highest incarceration rate in Central America.

During the 2010s, as the region became a key site of drug-trafficking, Costa Rica’s security policy continued to harden, supported by US security assistance, new taxes to finance the Ministry of Public Security, and the creation of the Border Police. The COVID-19 pandemic further intensified these dynamics, particularly in tourism-dependent coastal areas that became flash points for organized crime. This period was also marked by increasingly spectacular violence and a sharp rise in the homicide rate, from around six per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 to over sixteen by 2025.

It was under these conditions that Costa Rica’s trajectory converged more clearly with that of the rest of the region through the politicization of crime. Chaves’s government faced growing public concern over rising violence and accusations of corruption, reinforced by scandals such as the arrest and US extradition request of former security minister and Supreme Court magistrate Celso Gamboa on drug-trafficking charges.

Rather than constituting a political liability, the surge in violent crime and concerns over narco penetration became a political opportunity for Chaves. He deflected responsibility by blaming the media for exaggerating insecurity and accusing judicial, legislative, and oversight institutions of incompetence or capture. In this way, insecurity was reframed not as a failure of state action, but as further justification for a stronger law-and-order executive unconstrained by hostile institutions.

Against this backdrop, insecurity overtook the economy as the electorate’s top concern ahead of the 2026 runoff and became the central theme of Laura Fernández’s campaign. Fernández openly embraced an iron-fist approach to crime, prioritizing order and territorial control over civil liberties, a stance symbolically reinforced by Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele’s January 2026 visit to inaugurate a high-security prison modeled on El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).

Reconfiguring Democracy

As with many populist political projects, rodriguismo is best understood as an intensification of, rather than a rupture in, Costa Rica’s recent political trajectory. It combines a populist political style with a technocratic economic agenda centered on fiscal discipline and welfare state retrenchment. What distinguishes it is less the novelty of its objectives than the manner in which they are pursued: the permanent politicization of institutional conflict, the subordination of social policy to fiscal orthodoxy despite its social costs, and a growing concentration of power in the executive.

Seen this way, rodriguismo does not break with democracy so much as it reconfigures it. Popular mandates and the language of “the people” remain central, but they are increasingly used to discipline opposition, contain social demands, and protect an unequal economic order. Thus, the real danger is not democratic collapse but the normalization of governing through insecurity and permanent conflict. Whether Costa Rica’s “Third Republic” will deepen this trajectory or generate new forms of resistance remains an open question, one with implications far beyond the country’s borders.