Do we like them?

Do we like Jeannette Jara?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A solid record for workers and nothing harmful found, but thin on LGBTQ+ issues and with one contested answer on Cuba.

Jeannette Jara is a Chilean Communist who became one of the few working-class candidates in recent decades to be a serious contender for president. Al Jazeera reports her 2025 run was the first time a Communist Party candidate had been nominated to lead a major Chilean coalition. Chilean reporting says she has been in the party since she was 14.

Her big claim to fame is the job she did as Labour Minister under Gabriel Boric. She led the push to cut the working week from 45 hours to 40, and she ran for president on her record of lifting the minimum wage. Jacobin also credits her with working alongside a trade unionist on a workplace violence law that passed on 1 August 2024.

The campaign itself went well at first. She topped the first round in November 2025 with about 26.7 per cent of the vote, with roughly 83 per cent counted, ahead of José Antonio Kast. Her platform pitched more police, lifting banking secrecy to go after organised crime, and a lift in the minimum wage. She also kept some distance from Boric and hinted she might leave the Communist Party if elected.

Then came the runoff. On 14 December 2025 Kast beat her by about 58 per cent to 42 per cent, according to Al Jazeera's report of the count. Jara conceded and Boric congratulated the winner, so there was no stoush over the result.

The messiest part of her record is Cuba and Venezuela. In April 2025 she called Venezuela's government an authoritarian regime, but said Cuba has a democratic system that is different from Chile's, and Chilean media reported criticism of that from across the political spectrum. In January 2026 she again put some distance between herself and the party leadership on foreign relations. Where you land depends on whether you read her as a pragmatist who broke with her party or as someone who dodged the word dictatorship for Cuba.

On the harm check, we found nothing hateful from her: no attacks on LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the climate, and no conspiracy-theory slide. Coverage of her 2025 platform says she backed legal abortion, which is a contested issue in Chile, though reports differed on whether it made it into her final programme. Honestly, the reporting we could open says little on LGBTQ+ rights specifically, so this is a gap and not a clean bill of health.