By Rodrigo Acuña
12 November 2025
This coming weekend, Chile will witness another presidential election — the ninth since the U.S.-backed dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet stepped down from power in 1990. While several candidates are seeking to woo voters in the first round of balloting this month, the main battle for the presidency will most likely come down to two figures in the second round in December: the Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara Román (age 51), who is running for the incumbent Apruebo Dignidad coalition, and the far right politician José Antonio Kast (age 59) of the Republican Party.
At first glance, in a country where less than 10 percent of the media is publicly owned and the rest (with a strong anti-progressive bias) is in private hands, putting forward Jara as a presidential candidate may appear an odd choice. Outside of the Revolutionary Left Movement, the Communist Party of Chile was the most persecuted political organization under Pinochet’s dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. In 1983, the party created an armed faction known as the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez, which in 1986 came within seconds of assassinating Pinochet in one of the most dramatic political attacks in modern Latin American history.
Legally re-registered in 1989, the Communist Party of Chile remained excluded from congressional representation for two decades, largely due to the restrictive dual-member electoral system. It was not until the 2009 elections that the party finally returned to parliament, after having formed a strategic alliance with the center-left Concertación coalition. In 2015, Chile’s dual-member system was replaced by a proportional representation system.
Speaking to Truthout, freelance journalist Andrés Figueroa Cornejo, who works in Santiago, described Jara as a “former university classmate.”
“Since I’ve known her,” said Figueroa Cornejo, “she has been part of the Chilean institutional left — the sector that believes that by promoting gradual, progressive changes, the structures of the Chilean capitalist state can one day be transformed.” He added that during her tenure at the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare from early 2022 until April 2025, under the government of center-left President Gabriel Boric, Jara “displayed very good intentions, but that ministry has always been subordinate to the Ministry of Finance, where the public purse is held.”
Professor Sergio Grez Toso, a distinguished historian at the Universidad de Chile, told Truthout that “Jara is a skilled professional politician who has managed to build a career by climbing to the highest levels of the political-administrative hierarchy of the subsidiary state.” However, he noted that this rise occurred “within the framework of a prevailing neoliberal economy and a society governed by a restricted, tutelary, and low-intensity democracy that has existed in this country since 1990.”
Taking into consideration Jara’s political rise to position herself as the center-left’s leading presidential candidate, her background story is still interesting. It also explains why she is popular among many working-class Chileans who can identify with her humble origins.
Born in the commune of Conchalí, in northern Santiago, Jara grew up in the neighborhood of El Cortijo living in a mediagua (makeshift home) without access to running water. Raised primarily by her grandmother, she joined the Juventudes Comunistas de Chile (Communist Youth of Chile) at the age of 14.
She worked a variety of temporary jobs during her youth, such as a seasonal farm worker and a street vendor. Then, in 1997, as president of the Student Federation of the University of Santiago, she was arrested for her participation in a student protest demanding educational reforms. That same year, Jara helped organize a memorial at Chile’s National Stadium for the 30th anniversary of Che Guevara’s death that was attended by 60,000 people. Graduating with a degree in public administration, she then went on to obtain a law degree from the Universidad Central de Chile.
During her tenure as minister of labor, Jara claims she helped implement legislation reducing the normal workweek from 45 to 40 hours. Some of the other triumphs she points to include the introduction of a law (“Ley Karin”) addressing workplace harassment and violence, the implementation of a significant increase in the minimum wage, and the adoption of pension reforms that led to an increase in contributions from employers.
While pushing for greater gender equality in the workforce, Jara has come under criticism due to a rise in female unemployment during her tenure from 8.7 percent to 9.7 percent. Worse, general unemployment increased from 7.8 percent in March 2022, to 8.8 percent in April 2025 when she stepped down from the ministry.
Grez Toso told Truthout, “Although [Jara] formally maintains membership in the Communist Party, she has recently declared her social-democratic orientation. In reality, she represents the most conservative wing of the party — those leaders who have held high posts in Gabriel Boric’s government or have been the least critical of his performance.”
Before Boric launched his presidential campaign in 2021, his main rival for leadership of the Chilean left was Daniel Jadue, the Communist Party mayor of Recoleta. Although Boric, representing the Social Convergence Party, ultimately defeated Jadue to become the Apruebo Dignidad coalition’s presidential candidate who won the race for the presidency, the inclusion of the Communist Party of Chile in the coalition that brought Boric to power has permanently linked Jara to his administration, which has polled badly throughout most of its term in office.
Boric’s presidency began in 2022 after massive demonstrations against the legacy of Pinochet’s mass privatization devastated the country from 2019 to 2020 — an uprising known as el estallido social (“the social outburst”). Boric, who was once a prominent radical student leader who promised to transform Chilean politics, went on to face widespread criticism in office for failing to garner enough support to replace the 1980 Constitution imposed under military rule. Boric’s government has, at best, introduced only limited constitutional reforms.
In southern Chile, Boric has faced intense criticism for failing to resolve the conflict between Mapuche Indigenous communities and powerful logging and forestry companies. Figueroa Cornejo said Boric’s administration has presided over “a vicious battery of repressive laws passed not only against the Mapuche people in resistance, but also against all dissent toward the dominant order.”
Adding to the pressure, corporate media outlets have increasingly focused on rising crime rates — particularly violent and cartel-related crime — despite Chile’s homicide rate still being one of the lowest in Latin America. Between 2021 and 2022, Chile’s national public prosecution service (Fiscalía de Chile) reported a 46 percent increase in homicides, reaching 6.7 per 100,000 inhabitants. However, subsequent reports for 2023 and 2024 indicate a downward trend, with a 4 percent decrease in homicides year over year. Despite this, Chile recorded 868 kidnappings in 2024 — the highest figure in a decade.
As Chile experienced a 16 percent increase in irregular migration between 2018 and 2023, immigration — along with crime and public safety — has become deeply politicized and central to the national agenda.
Writing for Global Americans, a U.S.-based think tank focused on Latin America, Victoria Flowerree and Juan Diego Solís de Ovando Bitar observed that “the economy is the other defining pillar of this election,” noting that “after more than a decade of weak growth, many Chileans feel the country has lost its momentum” and want “an economy that creates opportunities again.”
The hard right in Chile has been able to capitalize on all of these issues. “Currently,” says Rafael Agacino, an independent economics researcher based in Santiago who spoke to Truthout, of the three Chilean presidential candidates with German heritage, “[Evelyn] Matthei, [Johannes] Kaiser, and Kast — it is Kast who, according to all polls, has the best chance of winning both the first and second rounds to be anointed President of Chile.” He adds:
“But Kast is not a libertarian in the style of [Argentina’s President Javier] Milei or Kaiser, nor a neoliberal in the economic sense like Matthei. He is rather a political conservative and an ideological corporatist, rooted in a clearly authoritarian and anti-popular tendency. His family’s Nazi affiliation is well-known. Yet, because of how he has presented himself in this campaign — as a centrist compared to the ultra-rightist Kaiser — this has not been used against him as it was in his previous candidacy.”
Agacino argues that Kast’s historical ties to Pinochet — and his father’s ties to the Nazi regime — no longer spark outrage because Chile is undergoing a broader shift toward conservative and authoritarian attitudes.
Back in 2021, during that year’s presidential election, two Associated Press journalists uncovered a record in Germany’s Federal Archive showing that an 18-year-old man named Michael Kast joined the Nazi Party in Germany on September 1, 1942. As reported by The Washington Post, this document essentially confirmed that this man was the father of the current Republican candidate, José Antonio Kast. Chilean journalist Javier Rebolledo, in his book Shadow of the Crows, claims that Michael Kast rose to the rank of second lieutenant in the German army. Upon Kast’s capture by U.S. forces in April 1945, another journalist, Manuel Salazar Salvo, claims that Kast “jumped from the second floor of a school, where he was a prisoner, and escaped,” eventually making his way to South America.
In Chile, Kast and his wife Olga María Kreszencia Rist had 10 children, including Miguel Kast Rist — one of the original Chicago Boys and a minister of labor under Pinochet. In 1982, Miguel Kast was appointed president of Chile’s Central Bank but died of cancer a year later.
In 1988, during the plebiscite on whether Chile should continue under military rule or move toward a democracy, a young José Antonio Kast appeared in a broadcast in support of Pinochet’s continued rule. Following his qualification as a lawyer from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Kast founded a law firm and managed his family’s real estate company during the 1990s, prior to his move into politics.
Reflecting on the dictatorship, José Antonio Kast said in Spanish in 2020 that he was “not a Pinochetista,” but that he valued “what was done during the Military Government” and what his brother “did as a minister” on public spending. In 2017, Kast told the media that if Pinochet were alive, “he would vote for me.”
Commenting on the connection between today’s far right and Chile’s past, Figueroa Cornejo told Truthout:
“The younger generations, who did not suffer under Pinochet’s tyranny, view the dictatorship as something from prehistory. And be warned — it’s not just Kast who is of German origin and embraces a supremacist, authoritarian, and racist Pan-Germanism. Evelyn Matthei is the daughter of a member of the dictatorship’s military junta, and Johannes Kaiser, also of German origin, is a full-fledged fascist.”
Figueroa Cornejo predicts that a Kast government will see major crackdowns on student protests and Indigenous demonstrations, mass evictions of the unhoused people who occupy land to survive, and renewed attacks on Chile’s already weakened unions. He warns that further privatizations could follow — a serious problem if one considers that mining in general makes up 55 percent of Chilean exports, and copper mining makes up around 45 percent. In 2024, Codelco, the world largest state-owned copper company, only accounted for 25 percent of Chile’s copper output.
Reflecting on the post-dictatorship period, Grez Toso criticized the Concertación coalition governments led by the Christian Democratic Party, the Party for Democracy, and the Socialist Party between 1990 and 2010. These governments, he said, “granted democratic credentials to the [right-wing] parties and leaders who were the civilian backbone of the dictatorship — and who are now rubbing their hands together, preparing to return to power for a third time with proposals more radical than those of [former President] Sebastián Piñera’s two terms.”
According to Grez Toso, after the Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution of November 15, 2019 — which sought to contain the estallido social protests — a broader conservative backlash began to take shape, one that the Boric government’s centrist policies have since helped entrench. These policies, he argues, have contributed to “the demobilization of popular social movements and to disillusionment, apathy, and fatigue among large segments of left-leaning or progressive citizens.”
Agacino was similarly critical of Boric’s administration and unimpressed with Jara’s record as labor minister. Based on current polling, Figueroa Cornejo believes that Kast is the most likely to win Chile’s second round of voting in December if no candidate secures a majority in the first. Grez Toso shares that view, saying that barring an “extraordinary, unpredictable event,” Jara will suffer a “resounding defeat” in the second round.
Chileans will head to the polls for the first round on November 16.