Jaime Mulet, the regional candidate who aims for his party to climb “a step higher” in Chilean politics.

In the Chilean left’s primary elections this Sunday, which will determine only one candidacy to face the right in the presidential elections on November 16, Congressman Jaime Mulet (Vallenar, 61 years old) from the Green Social Regionalist Federation (FRVS), is the least popular candidate: all polls place him in last place. Of the four candidates, he is the only one without a direct link to President Gabriel Boric: social democrat Carolina Tohá and communist Jeannette Jara were his ministers, and Gonzalo Winter, from the Broad Front, is a close friend of the president and part of his political generation. “I am center-left; on a scale of one to ten, I place myself at four toward the left. I am humanist, Christian, regionalist, and green,” Mulet tells Adolfo Kunjuk News.

His green identity is reflected in his clothing, as the lawyer and master’s in Business Administration often wears items in that color: a scarf and glasses; a tie or jacket. This is a direct reference to the FRVS, which he founded in 2017, and whose president is Flavia Torrealba, his wife. It is an ecological party that seeks to transfer power to regions and municipalities, and in January, it nominated him to compete in the primaries.

The FRVS is the third political formation Mulet is involved with. He was part of the Christian Democratic Party (DC) for 28 years, of which his father, Juan Mulet Bou, was one of the founders. This was a party that was part of the former Concertación, which governed Chile from 1990 to 2010, and which Mulet resigned from in 2008. After a period out of politics, he co-founded the Independent Regionalist Party (PRI) with Adolfo Zaldívar, a former DC senator who passed away in 2013 and whom he considers his mentor.

His party is debuting in a primary election, which for their candidate, whose campaign slogan is Mulet, brave heart, represents significant progress. Therefore, Mulet asserts that, even if he does not secure enough votes to compete in the presidential elections, it is already “one more step” for the party’s short history. “We are taking another step, but we are definitely not wagering our lives on this leftist primary,” he tells this newspaper.

In light of the polls that have positioned Jara and Tohá as favorites, Mulet expresses special optimism: “I do not lose hope of winning the election, although I know it is very difficult. But I have never had easy tasks, and polls are just polls.”

If defeated, he states that he would still win. “My party and I started this candidacy with a very low profile compared to my opponents, and we have been getting known since then. In other words, there is now more awareness of the FRVS and its political project. Definitely, any outcome is a gain for us,” he states.

His party, which has around 18,000 members and includes a minister in the Government – the Minister of Agriculture, Esteban Valenzuela – is trying to grow rapidly amid questions regarding the role of small parties in Chile. For example, Congress is discussing a project to reform the political and electoral system that, among other measures, establishes that parties that achieve at least 5% of validly cast votes in the election of members of the Chamber of Deputies will have the right to participate in seat allocation. Mulet has shown support for discouraging political fragmentation but opposes the initiative.

Politicians, like former Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle (1994-2000), have labeled these formations as political SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) and stated that they are “killing the country.” However, Mulet, in a debate hosted by Radio ADN and Prisa Media, responded that the former president was mistaken: “Why would my party be an SME? It is a great party that is growing throughout Chile and moving forward; we are in all 16 regions, we are doing very well, and we are a great political project.”

He has not been the only target during this campaign. In another debate organized by Radio Pauta and The Clinic, Carolina Tohá claimed that the FRVS candidacy belongs to a “sector that has oscillated more to the right or left several times.”

Mulet, who defines himself as “the provincial” in this primary, claims that he differentiates himself from Tohá and his other competitors, Jara and Deputy Winter, in “aspects of moral order,” meaning regarding individual freedoms. He is the only candidate who is against the decriminalization of abortion, although he supports the interruption of pregnancy in three specific cases, which has been legal in Chile since 2017.

He also points out another difference: he does not belong to “the Chilean political elite,” something that, according to him, allows him to see the country’s landscape with “greater realism, in its true dimension.” “I have been a parliamentarian for a long time, but I have not been in the circles of decision-making power. Rather, I have been someone who has challenged power.”

He has served as a congressman for the Atacama region in northern Chile, during the periods from 1998 to 2010 and from 2018 to 2026. In Congress, he pushed for the mining royalty and the controversial first early withdrawal of pension funds. He is proud of these initiatives, despite the last one opening the door to two additional rounds of withdrawals that exacerbated inflation. “It was a project of my authorship, at a time when then-President Sebastián Piñera was not supporting the citizens during the pandemic,” he states.

By then, he was already focused on a green and regionalist project that he believes would modernize the Chilean state: “We understand development with a lot of transfer of functions and power to all the regions according to their peculiarities, with levels of autonomy, with some territorial taxes and responsibilities, without regional presidential delegates,” he asserts. He even does not rule out that functions should be transferred to neighborhood councils.

Today, he rates Boric’s government with a score of four, on a scale from one to seven. He criticizes its management regarding migration. “If I were president, the first thing I would do is speak from the balcony of La Moneda and tell neighboring countries and Latin America that Chile cannot accommodate any more immigrants (…) We need to reinforce the borders and tighten relations with Bolivia, which has a lot of responsibility in trafficking,” he promises.

After the results this Sunday, he commits to supporting whoever is elected. “I like politics, although I know it has triumphs and pains. I have won and lost elections… But, as the saying goes, when ‘someone closes the door, the Lord opens a gate,” he says.