By Jesús Guzmán-Castillo
Costa Rica’s “Third Republic” is not just a political slogan—it is a narrative that turns accountability into obstruction and reframes democratic oversight as a relic of a failed past.
Laura Fernández Delgado, Costa Rica’s president-elect, did not merely promise change after her victory on February 1, 2026. In her post-election speech, she declared the beginning of a new historical era. “What was once called the Second Republic,” she announced, “has now been left in the past.” Costa Rica, in her telling, was now founding a “Third Republic.”
Fernández’s “Third Republic” is not merely a slogan. It is a governing script: one that turns institutional oversight into a symbol of the old order, and subordination to the executive into the language of democratic renewal.
What the “Second Republic” Was
The “Second Republic” refers to the political and institutional arrangements established after Costa Rica’s 1948 Civil War. That order rested on two pillars: strong checks and balances with electoral transparency, and a social contract sustained by robust public investment in health, education, and care. By regional standards, it was a genuine democratic success. That record matters, because the refoundational narrative needs something real to reject.
Over time, however, the system accumulated serious strains. Rising inequality, a fragmenting party system, and widespread frustration with state performance had produced a deep crisis of political representation by 2026. The refoundational narrative turns that frustration into a demand to replace the political order: not “fix the system”, but “start over”. The Second Republic’s real achievements are recast as proof that the model is exhausted. Its failures become the justification for burying it.
Over time, however, the system accumulated serious strains. Rising inequality, a fragmenting party system, and widespread frustration with state performance had produced a deep crisis of political representation.
From Confrontation to Refoundation
To understand what Fernández represents, it helps to look at what preceded her. Former president Rodrigo Chaves governed through relentless confrontation with the judiciary, the attorney general, the Comptroller General’s Office, the media, and civil society. The Inter-American Press Association documented a worrying deterioration of press freedom during his term. This pattern fits what political scientist Guillermo O’Donnell called delegative democracy: the assumption that a presidential victory confers a broad right to govern “as one sees fit,” treating institutional checks as anti-democratic interference. Fernández’s election, backed by Chaves and his allies, can be understood as the continuation of that project, not its correction.
But Chaves offered no narrative to sustain that posture. He eroded institutions through pure antagonism, and that is a fragile strategy. Permanent confrontation exhausts political capital, generates backlash, and requires constant renewal. His political project risked dying with his administration rather than outlasting it. It destabilized; it did not consolidate.
Fernández changes that. Her “Third Republic” functions as a justificatory narrative: it draws a moral boundary between “the old” and “the new” and prepares the ground for treating oversight bodies as remnants of a failed order. When Fernández stated that “Costa Rica has closed a cycle,” she did more than celebrate electoral change. She tied refoundation to a symbolic break with bipartidism and to the promise of ending corruption and state inefficiency, framing institutional redesign not as an attack on democracy but as its long-overdue completion.
Across several press conferences, Fernández distinguished between an opposition that is “watchful and supervisory” and one that is “obstructionist and sabotaging.” Asked about oversight bodies, she argued that she does not believe in “institutions that overextend their powers” and that her mandate should enable “institutions to realign themselves.” This is what makes the shift consequential: accountability is not openly rejected but redescribed as an obstacle to renewal.
Where Chaves destabilized, Fernández historicizes. The erosion of checks and balances stops appearing as an aggressive act and becomes an inevitable feature of building something new. It is a fundamentally more stable form of democratic erosion: one that does not depend on a single confrontational leader, but on a narrative capable of outlasting him.
The erosion of checks and balances stops appearing as an aggressive act and becomes an inevitable feature of building something new.
Refoundational Authoritarianism
I call this pattern refoundational authoritarianism: a mode of democratic erosion that operates through a foundational myth rather than an open rupture. The notion of refoundation has appeared in Latin American politics in distinct variants: from the openly authoritarian refoundation of Pinochet’s Chile, to the left-populist constitutional refoundations of the ALBA wave, and more recently to democratic constitutional processes such as Chile’s 2022 constituent experience. What these cases share is the use of a refoundational narrative to delegitimize existing institutions and reconfigure the rules of the political game. In Fernández’s case, however, refoundational authoritarianism does not seek a new legal order. Its goal is narrower but no less consequential: to shift legitimacy away from law and oversight and toward “mandate” and “renewal.”
What makes the pattern particularly durable is what political scientist Nancy Bermeo identified about executive aggrandizement: incremental power concentration is hard to contest because each step appears reasonable in isolation. Refoundational authoritarianism compounds that problem. By framing institutional oversight as a relic of a failed past, it turns every act of resistance into evidence of obstruction. Defending checks and balances becomes, rhetorically, defending the very system that failed. This is the authoritarian innovation Fernández introduces: not the elimination of elections, but the delegitimization of accountability itself. It is, as Levitsky and Ziblatt argue, the slow erosion of norms that makes democratic death possible without a single dramatic blow, and it is even more dangerous for looking, in the moment, like progress.
This is the authoritarian innovation Fernández introduces: not the elimination of elections, but the delegitimization of accountability itself.
Why Costa Rica Matters
Costa Rica matters precisely because it has strong institutions. If refoundational authoritarianism can take root here, after more than seven decades of uninterrupted democracy, the question is not whether this could happen elsewhere, but whether we would recognize it. The “Third Republic” does not require a coup, a new constitution, or a legislative majority. It requires only a compelling story: that the old order failed, that the new mandate is popular, and that whoever defends existing institutions is defending existing failures. When that story becomes common sense, eroding accountability stops looking like an attack on democracy. It starts looking like democracy itself.
Jesús Guzmán-Castillo, PhD candidate in Social Sciences at Diego Portales University of Chile and Professor at the School of Political Science of the University of Costa Rica.
This article is published under the sole responsibility of the author, with editorial oversight. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the editorial team or the CEU Democracy Institute.
