Of the eight presidential candidates who will compete in the elections this Sunday, November 16, there are four who will run with less advantage to go to the run-off on December 14. This is Franco Parisi, representative of the Popular Party; and independents Harold Mayne-Nicholls, Marco Enríquez-Ominami and Eduardo Artés. The last three never exceeded 10% of the votes in the polls released before the ban on voting, which had been in force for 15 days.
These are their stories and the paths they took to achieve these votes:
Franco Parisi, the populist who wants to surprise again in the presidential elections
“Chile is not facho neither of them common“, repeats the populist Franco Parisi Fernández (Santiago, 58 years old) over and over again in his presidential campaign. He is a member of the Popular Party, the party he founded six years ago, and this is his third attempt to get to the presidency of Chile.
When he ran for the first time, in 2013, he did so as an independent. Second EmolParisi said in that campaign: “I am not the son of any leader, nor senator nor deputy, nor founder of anything. I am just a neighbor on the street and a teacher “He wants to be president and create a government for the people and with political parties, not for political parties.”
With his anti-political speech he obtained 10.11% of the votes, placing him in fourth place among the candidates. And in his second candidacy, in 2021, he reached 12.8% of the votes, placing third in the elections of November 21 of the same year, surpassed only by the Republican José Antonio Kast, of the radical right, and by the left Gabriel Boric. The cornerstone of that campaign was that he never set foot in Chile because he had a restraining order for failing to pay child support for his two children.
The candidate was baptized by the press ghost, absent or the telecandidate for those days. He returned to the country only after a court revoked that measure, in 2023, and today promises events tuning –as the hobby of transforming cars is known– around the Moneda Palace, “bullet or prison for criminals”, bring the military to the streets, put an end to the violence in Araucanía in eight months through commando operations and refund the value added tax on medicines.
He is an economist, with a PhD in Finance from the University of Georgia, and has been a university professor in Chile and the United States. His fame skyrocketed after the premiere of his television show The Parisi: the power of the peoplein 2012.
Harold Mayne-Nicholls, the presidential outsider
This journalist is the stranger of the Chilean presidential elections. Harold Mayne-Nicholls Sécul (Antofagasta, 64 years old) is independent, without militancy or previous political experience. His career focuses on the sporting field: he worked at FIFA between 1993 and 2012 and presided over the National Association of Professional Football (ANFP) between 2007 and 2015, where he stood out for having hired the Argentine Marcelo Bielsa as coach of the Chilean team.
In 2015, Mayne-Nicholls was banned for seven years – reduced to four – for breaching confidentiality rules while he headed the committee evaluating the 2018 and 2022 World Cup venues. He subsequently headed the Santiago 2023 Corporation, responsible for the Pan American and Parapan American Games.
He says his presidential aspiration was born after requests from people who appreciated his sports management. Today he tries to reach the political center. Its motto is “Restore the soul to Chile”, focused on recovering trust, decency and tolerance. When asked if he is right or left he replies that he is on the side of the people. But in the 1988 plebiscite he voted yes to the continuation of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, something he now says he regrets.
He faced some controversy in his campaign. He was accused of assaulting a former councillor, which he acknowledged and regretted; and the Supreme Court recently reopened an investigation into alleged improper receipts of collateral during the 2023 Pan American Games.
Marco Enríquez-Ominami, the eternal candidate of La Moneda
Marco Enríquez-Ominami Gumucio (Santiago, 52 years old) debuted as a presidential candidate in 2009, as an independent after resigning from the Socialist Party (PS), and obtained 20.14% of the votes in the first round —around 1.4 million votes—, his best electoral result to date. Since then he has run three more times (2013, 2017 and 2021), and now, in 2025, he is trying for the fifth time, a record in Chilean political history. Even though it has lost strength as a political option – especially since the emergence of the Frente Amplio – and the latest polls have not favored it, he says he persists out of “love for Chile” and because he believes in the fruits of perseverance.
The Prosecutor’s Office investigated him for almost a decade for alleged tax crimes in the context of MQ casea benefit of the illegal political financing scheme called Penta. But he was finally acquitted by a court on October 22, a day he considered probably the most important of his life, after the exile, according to The third.
Enríquez-Ominami was born into a family marked by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His biological father, Miguel Enríquez, was one of the founders of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), an organization he led until his assassination in 1974 at the hands of agents of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA). During his childhood, Enríquez-Ominami lived in exile in France together with his mother, the journalist and television producer Manuela Gumucio.
His adoptive father is Carlos Ominami, former senator and former Minister of Economy in the government of Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994), historic socialist leader and recurring figure of the transition.
A graduate in philosophy and director, he has been married to the Chilean television presenter Karen Doggenweiler for 22 years. He was an MP from 2006 to 2010, and is one of the founders of the defunct Progressive Party. In 2019 he participated in the creation of the Puebla Group, a progressive group led by Ibero-American politicians such as former presidents José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (Spain), Alberto Fernández (Argentina), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador). In this group he has his main loyalties.
Eduardo Artés, the admirer of North Korea
He is a member and general secretary of the Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action), which he founded in 1979 after the split from the traditional PC. Eduardo Artés (San Vicente de Tagua Tagua, 74 years old) declares himself a Marxist-Leninist, proposes to re-establish the Chilean state and admires the North Korean regime, a country he visited in 2013. This far-left politician is known as the teacher for his teaching activity. He was a candidate for senator in 2005, but lost. However, this defeat did not take away his political appetite and he ran for president in the 2017, 2021 elections – he received only 0.51% and 1.46% of the vote respectively – and now in 2025.
He is critical of Gabriel Boric’s government, proposes a Constituent Assembly, the renationalization of strategic companies and the nationalization of lands. He warns that if the right wins, a social epidemic could repeat itself.
He studied in the evenings at Barros Borgoño high school and graduated in Pedagogy. His militancy began at the age of 15 in the Revolutionary Communist Party. Today, former president Salvador Allende claims responsibility. He is supported by Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, the former president’s nephew who lived in Venezuela and supported former president Hugo Chávez – he was the partner of one of his daughters – and the regime of Nicolás Maduro.
