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A COMMUNIST WINS THE LEFT PRIMARY IN CHILE AND PREPARES TO BATTLE THE
RIGHT IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN NOVEMBER  
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Vijay Prashad and Taroa Zúñiga Silva
July 3, 2025
ZNetwork
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_ When Jeanette Jara’s victory in the left primary was certain,
President Boric, congratulated her and said, 'Now, let’s all work
together for unity to rally the majority of our compatriots to
continue building a fairer, safer, and happier country’. _

Jeanette Jara (l.), Credit: Vocería de Gobierno, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via
Wikimedia Commons.

 

Jeanette Jara (born 1974) prevailed in the Chilean presidential
primary of the four major left political forces held on 29 June 2025.
With 60% of the vote, Jara defeated Carolina Toha of the Democratic
Socialist Party (28%), Gonzalo Winter of the Frente Amplio or Broad
Front (9%), and Jaime Mulet of the FRVS, a merger of the Greens and
the Progressives (2%). In November, Jara will therefore lead the
Unidad para Chile (Unity for Chile) coalition into the presidential
elections where she will face the candidate of the right, who will be
either Evelyn Matthei (born 1953) of the Independent Democratic Union
(UDI) or José Antonio Kast (born 1966) of the Republican Party, or
she will face both of them if they cannot agree to a single candidate.
If both Matthei and Kast stay in the race, they will, of course, split
the vote of the right and provide Jara with a historical opportunity
to win the election as a Communist. This has not happened in Chile’s
history. If Matthei and Kast decide to back one or the other and carry
all the votes of the right, then it appears likely that the left will
not win. But November is far away, and the jubilation of having Jara
as the candidate of the Unidad para Chile slate is evident. The
celebrations of 29 June carried deep into the night, with the flags of
the various left groups flying high in the air.

Jara was a member of the government of Gabriel Boric, who took office
in 2022. From March 2022, Jara served as Boric’s Minister of Labour
and Social Security, leaving only in April of this year to be the
Communist Party of Chile’s candidate in the presidential election.
This was the first time a Communist was a minister in Chile since the
military coup of Augusto Pinochet against the Popular Unity government
of Salvador Allende (1970–1973); during Allende’s government, the
Communist ministers were Orlando Millas (Finance) and Luis Figueroa
Mazuela (Labour and Social Security).

Before the elections that put Boric into power, we had met with him,
and he told us that his most important priority was pension reform. It
was no surprise that he turned to Jara to run this reform for his
government. She had worked as an Undersecretary of Social Development
(MDS) from 2016 to 2018 in the government of the social democratic
Michelle Bachelet (enormously popular in Chile for her time as
president from 2006–2010 and 2014–2018, a confidant of Jara, and
likely the next United Nations Secretary General). Reforms of pensions
are very difficult, torn between the neoliberal commitments of
financial institutions inside the government and the difficulties of
budgetary calculations based on the low levels of revenue brought in
by taxation. Jara’s attempt at pension reform had to be built
through concessions and coalitions, which, of course, weakened their
radical potential. But, even with all that, the pension reform
increased employer contributions by a new 7% figure, sharpened the
Universal Guaranteed Pension, provided substantial gender equity, and
strengthened the regulations of the pension industry. Anything short
of the elimination of private finance in pension schemes will not
satisfy a Marxist, but Jara had to work in the conditions provided to
her, which did not permit more than a few important reforms rather
than anything more revolutionary.

When Jara’s victory in the primary was certain, her former boss,
President Boric, congratulated her and said, ‘What lies ahead will
not be easy, but Jeannette knows about tough battles. Now, let’s all
work together for unity to rally the majority of our compatriots to
continue building a fairer, safer, and happier country’. Boric also
said that Jara would be a better president than him. The tough battle
is guaranteed, but Boric is right: Jara knows about tough battles.
Born in Conchalí, north of Santiago, to left-wing parents – her
father Sergio Jara, an industrial mechanic and mother Jeannette
Román, a homemaker with five kids – Jara joined the Juventudes
Comunistas (Young Communists) at the age of fourteen, the earliest
that one can do so. Married at 19, she was widowed at 21, which was a
very big blow to this young woman. ‘It was a very long period of
mourning’, Jara said. But it did not stop her. She became the
president of the Student Federation at the University of Santiago
(Feusach) in 1997 and led a series of student strikes against the
presidency of Eduardo Frei (1994–2000). In 1999, Jara joined the
Communist Party, and – when interviewed by its paper _El Siglo_ a
few years after – she said of her generation of Communists, ‘We
are conservatives. We lack political audacity and instinct. We need to
show that our opinions are diverse. On the left, no one should be
deferred to simply for standing in front of a guanaco [a riot control
vehicle]’.

Jara’s easy style – her casualness on Instagram, for instance –
has earned her a dedicated following. While she made instant coffee in
her kitchen and talked about the late Communist leader Gladys Marín,
her opponent, Carolina Tohá, made Bolivian coffee in a French press
and spoke about Trump’s tariffs. Kast’s father, Michael Kast
Shindele, fled Germany in the 1950s to prevent being put through
de-Nazification. He was a lieutenant in the Wehrmacht and a member of
the Nazi Party. When Michael Kast came to Chile, he joined together
with his family to become very rich through a sausage factory
initially. His son, the politician, does not disavow his father, and
indeed holds views that are comparable to the ideology that had
gripped him.

Matthei is not as extreme as Kast and will position herself as a more
liberal person and try to tar Jara with the negativity around
Communism that exists in Chilean society. Like Kast, Matthei has a
father who will pose his own challenges for his daughter. Fernando
Matthei Aubel, the son of a German military officer who was trained by
the US Air Force, returned to Chile after the 1973 coup to become a
general. During the dictatorship, General Matthei is said to have led
the programme for the testing of bacteriological weapons against
political prisoners. His daughter, Evelyn, joined the military
dictatorship government at its tail end to privatise the pension
system. In 2024, The Economist said of her that she is the ‘woman
who will lead Chile’s counterrevolution’. While Matthei tries to
hide her extremism, she recently said that the deaths during the
military dictatorship were inevitable.

So, the election may be between Jara, a hardworking Communist who
wants to build a social pension system, and Matthei, who worked in a
military dictatorship to privatise the pension system. If the choice
were that simple, then there would be no real election. But in the
months ahead, the media sphere will be muddied with half-truths and
full lies. Jara’s first battle will be over perceptions: the media
has already hit her hard for being a Communist; Jara will have to turn
the corner on the anti-Communism in Chile, which was cultivated during
the dictatorship.

If Jara wins, she will be the first Communist to win the presidency in
Chile.

This article was produced by Globetrotter
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_Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of
the Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord
Booksand the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research. He has written more than twenty books, including The Darker
Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (The New Press,
2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South (Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the
Arab Revolution(University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star
Over the Third World (LeftWord, 2017). He writes regularly for
Frontline, the Hindu, Newsclick, AlterNet and BirGün._

_Taroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media
coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana
García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI
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She is a member of the coordinating committee of Argos: International
Observatory on Migration and Human Rights
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the Mecha Cooperativa [[link removed]], a project of
the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación
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* Chile
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* Chilean Communist Party
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* Gabriel Boric
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* pension reform
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