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Costa Rica: A woman in charge?

07 February 2010 00:28 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. Chinchilla has consistently led in the polls and a victory in Sunday’s elections would make her the country’s first female president. She’s currently teetering near the 40 percent mark â€” anything below that and a runoff is in order, APA reports citing â€œGlobal Postâ€.

The former vice president falls somewhere around the center or center-right on the political spectrum, and was groomed within the social democratic tradition of the National Liberation Party (PLN). Sheâ€™s like the Democrats’ Clinton or Labourâ€™s Blair, explained Constantino Urcuyo, a leading Costa Rican political analyst and professor at University of Costa Rica. In other words, she can reach out to both sides of the aisle if she needs to.

Chinchillaâ€™s mind matured in left-wing college halls at a time when Costa Ricaâ€™s neighbors were crumbling into civil war. During her years in the early 1980s at the University of Costa Rica, Chinchilla wore clothes with indigenous patterns and colors common to the universityâ€™s leftist student body, recalled Urcuyo, with whom she studied and later worked as a professorâ€™s assistant.

Alvarez 50, an adviser at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., said Georgetown was wowed by her intellect. â€œSheâ€™s a lightning rod.â€

Today, bearing the PLNâ€™s green and white, the 50-year-old politician is confident she will become Latin Americaâ€™s newest female president, a growing list recently graced by outgoing Chilean President Michelle Bachelet and Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. Costa Ricaâ€™s closest neighbors, Panama and Nicaragua, both have achieved that milestone.

Chinchilla isnâ€™t the first female presidential candidate. But given Costa Ricaâ€™s progressive legislation on women in politics, itâ€™s a wonder it has taken so long for a woman to get this far.

By law, women must make up 40 percent of a party’s seats in the Legislative Assembly, and by 2014, the law mandates a 50-50 split. Thatâ€™s well above the world average. As of 2008, women occupied 18 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide, according to the International Women’s Democracy Center.

Parties also are obligated to include at least one woman on the ballot for their executive branch bids, whether for one of the two vice presidencies or the presidency.