Millenials will play a key role in the upcoming 2018 presidential election.
This group of people under 34 years old will represent 40% of voters in the country. Undoubtedly, this is a prize that any candidate will fight for to become the next president of Costa Rica.
To date, data from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) indicate that the voter registry is a total of 3, 256, 590 people. Of these, 1,632,571 are women and 1,624,019 are men. By age range, 40% are millennials, 12% are senior citizens, and 48% are people between the ages of 35 and 64.
However, millennials are further away from politics. This group showed the biggest abstentionism rate in the last election, which is reflected in the 2015 study “Youth and Democracy: Electoral behavior and political attitudes in Costa Rica”.
This report details that the young people were influenced in the last election by aspects like “wanting a change”, by the proposals and by the personality of the candidate. The study concluded that youth prefer digital media, they sympathize less with political parties and participate less in elections through voting.
According to political scientist Gustavo Araya, young people have become a difficult sector to integrate into electoral processes. Araya assured that the political communications usually unite all people under 30 in a single group, when in fact they have different interests and needs.
Similarly, Araya said that another common mistake is to believe that young people are only on social networks, when they can be reached in other ways.
Analyst Claudio Alpízar believes that young people are very active in networks, but they are attentive to public complaints and even manage their own agenda such as same sex marriage, the secular state and others.
Young people are interested in deep issues of health, technology, infrastructure, but the national politician believes they are interested in simple topics. The biggest shortcoming that our veteran politician has is that he is not receptive and believes that he already has the solutions for every problem,”
said the analyst.
Acording to Alpízar, young Costa Ricans look for a space to be heard, they demand different ways of solving the problems and they are also the people with the highest academic level of history.