Will a Communist be Chile’s next president?
Since 2012, Chilean elections have involved voluntary primaries, in which parties or coalitions of parties can run regulated polls to elect presidential candidates, parliamentary deputies, senators and mayors.
The left-of-centre Unity for Chile (Unidad por Chile) coalition, which currently forms President Gabriel Boric’s government in the National Congress, held primaries to select a presidential candidate on 29 June. The candidates included Jeannette Jara from the Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Chile, PCCh), Gonzalo Winter from the Broad Front (Frente Amplio), Jaime Mulet from the Social Green Regionalist Federation (Federación Regionalista Verde Social), and Carolina Tohá from the Party for Democracy (Partido por la Democracia, PPD) in partnership with the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and the Liberal Party.
The 20 percent lower turnout for these primaries, compared to the 2021 primaries that led to the selection of Boric, is a clear indicator of the loss of enthusiasm for a government that watered down what progressive agenda it had after the 2022 defeat of its constitutional referendum. Clearer still was the primary vote for Gonzalo Winter, from Boric’s Frente Amplio, who managed only 9 percent. The PPD’s Tohá got 28 percent, based on a barely disguised scare campaign of anti-communism. The Communist Party’s Jeannette Jara won the primaries convincingly across the entire country, with more than 60 percent (825,835 votes).
This is not surprising, as the few reforms the government has celebrated—in pensions, work week and minimum wage—were largely the work of the Communist Party, with Jeannette Jara leading the Ministry for Work and Social Provision. None of the reforms came for free. The 40-hour week and increased minimum wage both involved trade-offs in labour “flexibility”, and the pension reform was more a capitalist modernisation.
The fact that the Communist Party will lead the centre-left’s parliamentary campaign in the upcoming national election signals an important change in the balance of forces and reflects the growing polarisation across the continent. The mainstay of Chile’s post-dictatorship capitalist stability has been the centre-left forces of the neoliberal Socialist Party and PPD, alongside the historically weakened Christian Democrats. The Frente Amplio was always a swamp without a clear social base or ideological commonality.
The Chilean Communist Party is one of the oldest in the world, founded in 1912 as the Socialist Workers Party. It has a long history of supporting what it variously labelled progressive or nationalist bourgeois forces, participating in governments, and standing at the head of workers’ movements only to lead them into defeats, including the persecution of its own members.
Most tragically, the Communist Party bears significant blame for attempting to demobilise the workers’ movement during the Allende government and weakening it at its most decisive historical moment, before General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government in a coup in 1973. The Communists were the most conservative, conciliatory section of the Popular Unity coalition, leading attempts to hold back factory takeovers, strike deals with centrist parties and marginalise revolutionary forces.
Throughout this history and to date, it has maintained significant levels of support among workers. The party has the third largest electorally registered membership and, in recent years, has been top of this list. Unlike most other parties, centre-left and right, the PCCh’s 45,000 or so membership is significantly more meaningful, with neighbourhood-level organisation still existent in many parts of the country.
The PCCh youth organisation probably has more than 6,000 members, who are active at secondary school, university and neighbourhood levels. While this does not compare with the 100,000 organised militants it had in 1972, it is still a significant political force in a country where youth mobilisations have been centre stage for decades. Two of the key figures of the Boric government, Camila Vallejo (government spokesperson and head of education) and Karol Cariola (chair of the lower house), were important leaders of the Jota (as the Communist youth are known).
The Chilean Communist Party has a long Stalinist history and, like many of its counterparts, evolved in a Eurocommunist direction from the late 1960s onwards. However, the defeat of 1973 and the persecution that followed somewhat immunised the party from the precipitous decline and right-wing trajectory of many similar organisations worldwide. By 1984, the PCCh had shifted its perspective, resolving that the most probable road to democracy was a national uprising. It joined with revolutionary forces and, for a period, helped lead the democracy movement. This included setting up armed militias through the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, famed for the attempted assassination of Pinochet.
While relatively monolithic, the PCCh has its historically rooted tensions. The case of PCCh leader Daniel Jadue illustrates the continuation of these. Jadue, a Chilean of Palestinian origin, was mayor of the working-class Santiago district of Recoleta from 2012 to 2024. He became very popular for opening public pharmacies, popular libraries and an open university and for establishing a public housing builder. He contested the primaries in 2021 against Boric, getting almost 700,000 votes, compared to Boric’s million.
In 2024, Jadue was charged with crimes related to the funding of the public pharmacies, essentially for buying medicines with non-existent public funds. Since then, the entire political establishment has done everything possible to vilify Jadue and keep him off the political stage, including current efforts to prevent him from running in the coming parliamentary elections. In recent months, the PCCh president has engaged in public squabbles with their presidential candidate over whether Jadue would play a role in the election campaign.
The case of Jadue complicates the support the Jara campaign seeks from the centre of Chilean politics. As in the past, the more the PCCh looks in that direction, the more it plays into the hands of the right. In waiting are presidential candidates Evelyn Matthei, supported by two of Chile’s main modern bourgeois parties, National Renewal (Renovación Nacional) and the Independent Democratic Union (Unión Demócrata Independiente), and Antonio Kast, from the more newly established darling of the far right, the Republican Party.
[Red Flag will report from Chile on the presidential elections in October-November.]
