Q COSTA RICA — Costa Rica’s governing Partido Pueblo Soberano (PPSO) has introduced a constitutional amendment that would allow presidents to serve two consecutive terms and run again after a four-year break.
The proposal would replace the current rule, which requires former presidents to wait eight years after leaving office before seeking the presidency again.
The change could make former president Rodrigo Chaves eligible to run in 2030. Chaves led the country from 2022 to 2026 and is now serving as minister of the Presidency and minister of Finance in President Laura Fernández’s government.
Fernández took office for the 2026–2030 term and has presented herself as continuing Chaves’s political agenda.
A high bar in the legislature
The amendment needs 38 votes in Costa Rica’s 57-seat Legislative Assembly. The PPSO holds 31 seats, leaving it at least seven votes short of the qualified majority required to change the Constitution.
The proposal now enters legislative consideration, but the governing party has no guaranteed support from other parties.
PPSO lawmaker and former personal lawyer of Rodrigo Chaves, José Miguel Villalobos, challenged opponents to back the measure, asking whether they were afraid to do so.
Opposition lawmaker Abril Gordienko, from the PUSC, said the proposal did not appear to have enough support and described its passage as uncertain.
The political stakes
The proposal’s most immediate consequence would be to shorten the route for Chaves to seek another term. Under current rules, he would have to wait until after 2034 to try to return to the presidency; the amendment would potentially open the way for a 2030 candidacy. If elected, he could then seek a consecutive second term.
The timing has made the bill hard to disentangle from Chaves’s political future. If he wins the presidency in 2030 and is re-elected in 2034, he would remain shielded from the dozens of judicial cases against him through immunity; in particular, the two cases the Prosecutor’s Office has involving the former president: one concerning alleged parallel structures for the 2022 campaign financing, and another investigating the alleged irregular use of funds from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration. These are allegations, not findings of guilt.
Gordienko argued that the measure was tied to maintaining the immunity.
Analysis: reform, succession and institutional trust
The government can frame the proposal as a change to the rules of political competition: voters would be allowed to re-elect a president immediately, rather than waiting for a later cycle. But because the amendment could enable Chaves to run in 2030, debate is likely to focus as much on its immediate political beneficiary as on the general principle of re-election.
The legislative arithmetic will be decisive. With 31 seats, the PPSO cannot pass the amendment alone. Winning seven or more additional votes would require support beyond the governing bloc, and the opposition’s public skepticism suggests that securing that backing may be difficult.
The broader concern raised by opponents is whether the measure would weaken safeguards against the concentration of power. Those concerns relate to Chaves’s past calls during the 2026 campaign for voters to elect 38 “patriotic” lawmakers, and to his later comments that the public had regained control of the executive and legislative branches, with only the judiciary remaining. Those remarks help explain why a proposal about presidential terms has become a larger debate about institutional balance.
For now, the amendment is a proposal, not a change in the law. Its prospects will depend on whether the PPSO can persuade lawmakers outside its 31-member caucus to support a constitutional revision whose possible effects on Chaves are plain.