Is the hope of Luis Guillermo Solis, Presidential candidate Luis Gullermo Solis to get a million votes in the runoff election really necessary? That would be 32% of the total votes and history, according to La Nacion, indicates it won’t happen.
But, as former President Abel Pacheco (2002-2006) told La Nacion, “if only one person votes, then you can be President on one vote.” Partido Unidad Social Cristiana (PUSC) candidate Pacheco was the winner in 2002 of the only other runoff election, against Rolando Araya, the brother of the Partido Liberacion Nacional (PLN) candidate who withdrew from the campaign last week.
La Nacion’s research does not bode well for Solis’s hope. No President since the 1949 constitution has received even 50% of the vote. Solis’s goal is 32%, which is not bad but still probably a dream. Pacheco told the paper that the most votes in a runoff is a mandate. He should know.
Solis was emotional in his plea: “To be a President made illegitimate by a lack of votes doesn’t make me afraid. It sickens me…It would be worse for the President of the country with the longest democratic history in Latin America. It would be a historic tragedy…”
It just so happens that one of the most beloved presidents in history, Mario Echandi, won with 35.3% of the possible vote in 1958 and Oscar Arias won in 2006 with 34%. In fact the highest two winners were Luis Alberto Monge in 1982 with 45.1% and Jose María Figueres Ferrer (Don Pepe), one of the 20th century’s most successful politicians, in 1970 with 47.7%.
Pacheco received just 25.9% in the first round of his 2002 run and 23% in the runoff — but abstentionism shot up from 31.2% to 39.5%. The average of all elections since 1953 (including the first rounds in 2002 and 2014) has been just 26%.
Article by iNews.co.cr
