Chilean communist presidential candidate Jeanette Jara at the Electoral Tribunal headquarters, holding the document officializing her candidacy, July 14, 2025. Photo: Social media.
Fifteen days after the overwhelming victory of communist candidate Jeannette Jara in the primary elections of the Chilean progressive forces, she leads in popular support in the presidential race, far surpassing the right-wing candidacies. All polls in the last three weeks show the 51-year-old lawyer as the winner in the elections scheduled for November.
On Monday, July 14, Jara arrived at the Electoral Tribunal that officially proclaimed her as a presidential candidate. She was accompanied to the symbolic act by the presidents of the parties that competed in the primary election of last June 29: her party, the Communist Party of Chile and its allies of the Broad Front, the Socialists, the Party for Democracy, the Radical Party, the Liberals, the Humanists, and the Green Regionalists. She has already started conversations with all of them to form the campaign team, design the government proposals that she will present to the country, outline a strategy that will allow her to maintain the lead in the polls, carry out the field work, and try to form a single list of candidates for Congress.
The numbers have been in her favor since the primary campaign gained momentum, which resulted in her triumph with more than 60% of the votes. Since then, popular support for her keeps growing and has even dominated the mainstream media reporting.
According to the latest CADEM poll, which publishes the results of its surveys every week, Jara leads the presidential race with 29% of support, followed by the ultra-right Republican candidate José Antonio Kast with 27 points. Thus, the two are projected as probable protagonists of a second round.
Meanwhile, the candidate of the traditional right, Evelyn Matthei, is in third place with 14% of support. This is a significant collapse of her campaign, which for 22 months made her the favorite, but since March began to slow down. According to CADEM, Matthei has lost nine percentage points in the last month. The long campaign that she started when she was still mayor of the Santiago commune of Providencia almost two years ago has taken away novelty from her discourse, to which she has added an erratic narrative to maintain her anchorage in the right-wing electorate that Kast and the libertarian far-right candidate, Johannes Kaiser, as well as the populist Franco Parisi, are successfully disputing with her.
Congressman Johannes Kaiser, who scored six points in the polls, launched his candidacy last Saturday before some 3,ooo supporters. “Jeannette Jara is a [Michelle]] Bachelet on steroids,” he said in his speech marked by misogyny, racism and xenophobia. In any case, the act itself was a reaffirmation that he will contest in the presidential race in November and that he will not withdraw his candidacy, unlike what had been predicted by Matthei’s campaign team. In a way, Kaiser’s candidacy favors Kast, given that Kaiser is trying to monopolize the ultra-right discourse, which allows Kast to make moves to gain support from the more moderate right-wing electorate, which he is disputing with Matthei herself.
Communist Party Candidate Jeannette Jara Wins Chilean Primary Elections
Franco Parisi, on the other hand, scored eight points in the polls. This is the third time that he is running for the presidential seat, earlier as an independent and now with his creation, the Partido de la Gente (People’s Party). He is a right-wing populist who proposes easy solutions to the problems of the economy, such as lowering taxes, eliminating public services and similar measures. His 2021 campaign was carried out from the United States, where he works, and without being able to enter Chile because there was a judicial order against him in a child support lawsuit. Despite that, he obtained just over 12% of the votes in 2021 and came third, behind José Antonio Kast and current President Gabriel Boric.
If this general scenario takes shape, the right wing will compete in the first round with four candidates. The left and the center-left, on the other hand, will go mainly with the candidacy of Jeannette Jara, who would eventually go to the second round to contest the presidency with Kast. Still, given that there is a candidate registration deadline until August 18, some independent candidacies could be registered if they gather more than 35,000 signatures. Among the most probable ones are the socialist former Congressman Marco Enríquez-Ominami and the journalist and former professional soccer player, Harold Mayne-Nicholls, with a conservative profile.
According to Roberto Izikson, director of the pollster CADEM, all is not lost for Matthei. In an interview published on Tuesday in the newspaper La Segunda, the electoral expert claimed that the candidate of the traditional right can recover ground if she emphasizes her experience, trajectory, and capacity to generate governability and to perfect her economic proposal. “It is not a closed election, Matthei still has a lot to say,” he remarked.
For the time being, the presidential candidates are working to ensure that their parties reach agreements to draw up competitive parliamentary lists either to govern or to install opposition leaderships in Congress. The supporters of Kaiser and Kast have already agreed to run a united list of candidates from their parties—Republican and National Libertarian, while Matthei’s alliance, Chile Vamos, is trying to create a single list of the right-wing parties.
Jeannette Jara is also looking for a unitary list, to open space even to the Christian Democracy Party. This is not an easy taks, as there are some 400 pre-candidates who are trying to be on a list where there is only room for 180 names. The deadline is also coming closer, as registration closes on August 18.
(Diario Red)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/DZ
