Antonio Álvarez Desanti Jose Maria Figueres Olsen The 2021 National Liberation Party Convention was the primary election process by which supporters of the National Liberation Party, the first opposition force in Costa Rica, selected their presidential candidate for the 2022 general elections.

Antonio Álvarez Desanti, winner of the 2017 National Liberation Convention and therefore a candidate for the 2018 presidential elections, gave the party its worst electoral result in its history, obtaining 18% of the total votes in the first round, the lower percentage obtained by the group, as well as by not going to the second round for the first time in history.

[1] In April 2021, Álvarez granted his adhesion to the former president of the Republic, José María Figueres Olsen.

[2] On December 12, 2020, the National Assembly of the National Liberation Party approved to carry out a series of reforms to its statute in view of the general elections of 2022, among them the reduction of the number of candidacies for deputation that the elected presidential candidate can choose going from four to one, and the approval to hold a convention with an open registry, instead of one with a closed registry and mandatory party affiliation as it was before.

[4] On February 20, 2021, the national media Amelia Rueda reported that the former president of the Republic, Óscar Arias Sánchez, had a conversation with the former presidents José María Figueres Olsen and Laura Chinchilla Miranda, in which he proposed that they will choose a presidential candidate by consensus for the National Liberation Party.