The young progressive Costa Rican politician, Carlos Alvarado, bucked the recent Latin American shift to the right when he defeated the TV star and fundamentalist gospel singer Fabricio Alvarado of the National Restoration Party, who had rallied his forces against sex education and gay marriage.
The election on 1 April gave Carlos Alvarado Quesada’s National Action Party (PAN) more than 60 per cent of the vote and makes him one of the under-40 club of victors in presidential elections (France, New Zealand and Iceland). A former rock musician and novelist who served as labour minister in a previous PAN government, his success has prompted glib journalistic portraits of the contest as ‘gospel versus rock-and-roll’ but Carlos Alvarado sees his victory as a democratic push-back against the conservative populism sweeping the globe, which includes Brexit in the UK where he was a graduate student in development studies at the University of Sussex.
