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Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica who won the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end bloody civil wars in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, will be coming back to office on May 8. Election results were two weeks late because the margin between Arias and his main opponent Ottón Solís after the February 5 election was about 18,000 out of about 1.5 million votes cast and with challenges at hundreds of voting stations election authorities decided to recound the ballots by hand. Costa Rica was calm during the uncertainty and Solís conceded defeat after Arias was officially declared the winner.

The recount was necessary not just because of the close margin, but because the Costa Rican electoral system requires a presidential runoff if no candidate garners a majority and the leading candidate gets less than 40 percent of the vote. In this election Arias got 40.9 percent to Solís's 38.9 percent. Had the latter persisted in his challenges of various irregularities in more than 600 polling stations, it is conceivable that a runoff could have been forced. But after the Supreme Elections Tribunal announced that Arias had won the recount Solís dropped his party's objections, declaring that "the country needs clarity."

Solís came from a 20-point deficit in the last polls before the voting to nearly pull off an upset, and while he and his Citizens' Action Party (PAC) fell short in both the presidential and the legislative voting, they rode a wave of public disenchantment with the CAFTA free trade deal with the United States to become Costa Rica's second major party, with 18 seats in the 57-member legislature to 25 for Arias's National Liberation Party (PLN). Opposition to CAFTA and concerns about the traditional parties' corruption were the central themes in the PAC campaign. The incumbent Social Christian Unity Party (PUSC) was nearly eliminated, scoring single digits in the presidential voting and winning only four seats in the legislature. The right-wing Libertarian Movement got six seats and four other minor parties won a seat apiece. Given that Arias backs CAFTA, as do the PUSC and the Libertarians, it looks like the votes will be there to ratify the deal. However, on a lot of other matters it may be difficult for Arias to get the legislative support to carry out his programs.

Among the first people to visit Arias once it became clear that he had won were former Toyota CEO Shoichiro Toyoda and Germany's vice minister of economic cooperation and development, Erich Stather. That can be taken as one small indication that the multinational corporate sector that supports economic globalization on the terms that the world has come to know it were relieved that the "Pink Tide" that has been washing over much of Latin America this year spared Costa Rica.

However, the election wasn't supposed to be that close, and the fact that it was may mean that the rejection of the "Washington Consensus" economic policies that has been sweeping through the region may cause some more shocks in elections yet to come. In Mexico polls suggest that the left is slightly ahead in a close three-way race, while in Peru an anti-globalization candidate is likely to make it into a runoff with a conservative front-runner. Colombia's right-wing president looks like he will get another term in office, but he, too, is sliding in the polls. In Venezuela and Brazil incumbent leftists are likely to maintain their positions.

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