President Luis Guillermo Solís has one year to consolidate, initiate or fulfill the promises he made during his election campaign and when he took office in 2014.
However, analysts doubt he will do something different in the remaining months and believe inexperience has cost the president dearly.
Promises such as closing or transforming CONAVI, ending traffic jams or creating more than 200,000 jobs will pass without pain or glory in a year when he’ll manage rather than search for new projects, according to the experts.
Solís exaggerated his offer in the campaign and it was difficult for him to initiate the execution of works. Learning to govern was a difficult process for Solís and his cabinet, made up mostly of people with little or no experience in public administration.
That inexperience and lack of knowledge took its toll, and three years later it seems to be a government with much more experience, better knowledge of the public thing and how things are handled in Costa Rica,”
said Gustavo Araya.
For example, the famous phrase “less time in traffic, arrive home faster,” from the campaign, is the typical populist promise that neither this government nor any other can fulfill; same as the promise of fewer queues in the services of the Costa Rican Social Security Fund, because these are problems that have a deeper background and they have not found spot-on solutions.
For Francisco Barahona, the promise of a great change was only that, a promise, because this government did not work in a political reform of the State.
According to the analyst, despite the fact that Solís has said he will not stop working until noon on May 8th, 2018, when his term ends, the government will manage the country so that it does not get out of hand.
It is in the dynamic of concluding the best possible administration and fine-tuning details of public works,”
says Barahona.
Although a large percentage of Costa Ricans perceive corruption in government institutions, according to the Comptroller’s report, and the situations caused by illegal payments to ministers and deputy ministers, analysts have seen a better administration than in previous governments to end corruption, which has not reached large-scale levels.