On the eve of the November 16 elections, the growing popularity in the polls of Johannes Kaiser von Hohenhagen, founder of the National Libertarian Party (PNL), has called into question the leadership of the ultra-conservative José Antonio Kast. Even though he did not go to the ballot, but placed in fourth place, the 13.94% of the votes obtained and the nine seats in the Chamber of Deputies paved the way for him to participate in a future right-wing government in Chile. The current deputy is the eldest of six brothers, two of whom have political influence: Vanessa, elected senator, and the lawyer Axel, close to the Argentine president Javier Milei, who has extensive networks in the world of the Latin American right.
Politics has orbited around this family’s history for 70 years. The Kaiser’s grandfather, Friedrich Ernst Kaiser Richter, a German who emigrated to Chile between 1934 and 1936, was mayor of the city of Villarrica, in the southern region of Araucanía, between 1957 and 1958. Later, one of his four sons, Juan Cristián Kaiser Wagner, was a youth member of the now defunct National Party, nationalist and opposed to the government of Salvador Allende. (1970-1973). In 2001 he ran for parliament, supported by the right-wing UDI party, but was not elected. Two decades later, his eldest son, Johannes, won the parliamentary elections and became an MP in 2022, a position he will leave in March 2026, just as his sister Vanessa will take office as a senator for eight years.
The now former Libertarian candidate supported by Kast immediately learned the result of the election. At 49, he is considered more radical than the Republican. Opposes abortion, even rape; He assures that he would support a new coup if circumstances similar to those of 1973 were repeated and with all the “consequences” of this act. It also opened the door to pardons for those convicted of human rights violations during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and for police detained during the 2019 social uprising.
Before becoming a politician he worked as a waiter, worker and salesman in Austria, where he studied Law and Political Science at the University of Innsbruck, without however graduating. He is the father of three children, the last one is a daughter born from his marriage to the lawyer Ivette Avaria. Johannes became famous for his YouTube show, The National Libertariancreated in 2013, after becoming one of the voices against the social epidemic. He was a member of the Republican Party, founded by Kast, but abandoned his membership twice. The first resignation occurred after he was elected deputy, when excerpts of a video circulated on social networks in which he questioned the female vote and called immigrants rapists, although a few years later he said he felt sorry for having written “decriminalized things”. Once again he joined as a republican, but definitively resigned again during the second constituent process, the text of which was drafted mainly by representatives of that community.
“The most extreme”
Vanessa is the only woman in the Kaiser clan and defines herself as more radical than her brothers. “When they say I’m the most extreme of brothers, that’s correct!” he told the magazine velvet in the month of June. When consulted by THE COUNTRY In this regard, she assures: “I am more extreme because I can say what a man cannot say in this country (…) I can place myself more comfortably on the ideological spectrum because I am a woman and, in this sense, I can be more extreme because I can say what others cannot say.”
He promises to work in the Senate to suppress the “gender ideology” of the laws: “I want us to be like the English, everyone is equal. Everything that has been legislated with the word gender (in Chile) is unconstitutional because our Constitution talks about women and men, recognized by their biological sex.” He believes the genre is an invention of the new left to “deconstruct our institutions and their Judeo-Christian philosophical foundations.”
He ran for the Senate, representing the southern region of Araucanía, at the request of his brother Johannes, who, in return, asked him to stop smoking. “I continued smoking and he, fortunately, stopped. I accepted because Johannes told me that he needed a Congress, but also because I am sure that they will give us a coup d’état again, like on October 18, 2019 (…) The threats are already there”, he explains.
According to him, Johannes Kaiser obtained more votes than Evelyn Matthei, of the traditional right, because the coalition to which the candidate belongs, “Chile Vamos, has become an elite absolutely detached from popular reality” and has compromised with the left, including the Communist Party, in the approval of a pension reform.
It is not the first time that Vanessa Kaiser, a PNL activist, has held an elective office. She was a city councilor of Las Condes, a wealthy municipality in Santiago, in 2021, a position from which she resigned nine months after taking office. She did so for personal reasons, which led her to go to Germany where she remained until 2023. She is 48 years old, has three children and, although she does not come from a religious family – only her paternal grandmother was Lutheran – she defines herself as a believer in God and belongs to the Orthodox Church. She is a journalist, philosopher, academic, doctor in political science, and author of books Instead of just one look AND Don’t let them break your heartamong others. He hosts the show on YouTube Public sphere which has more than 81,000 subscribers.
The third of the Kaiser brothers, Axel, was the first to make himself known publicly for defending what he calls “the cultural battle” of liberal principles against progressive ideas. Lawyer, Doctor of Philosophy at Heidelberg University, academic and economist. He is the co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of the Foundation for Progress, a think tank Chilean who spreads ideas linked to classical liberalism and deputy academic director of the Argentine Faro Foundation, which promotes libertarian projects. He wrote almost twenty books. In one of his latest works, mental parasites (Ariel, 2024), criticizes the progressive left and harshly questions the principles of social justice, social rights, the welfare state, corporate social responsibility, diversity, equity and inclusion. This book, among others by his authorship such as Fatal ignorance (Unión Editorial, 2017), were praised by the Argentine president Javier Milei, with whom he has been a friend for seven years.
In a forum held in the municipality of Las Condes, Milei defined the lawyer as “a true giant of the ideas of freedom”. But some of Axel’s reflections have sparked controversy, as happened in 2013 when he stated that education is not a right, but a consumer good in society. Or even when, in 2018, he clashed with the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa by stating that there were “less bad dictatorships”, denied by the Nobel Prize winner: “No, dictatorships are all bad!”
According to the lawyer he is not a supporter of Pinochet, something he also underlined in an article on The thirdin 2015: “Defending the Pinochet model is different from being a Pinochetist. I happen to be a defender of freedom.” After his brother didn’t make it to the second round, Axel said in an interview Mercury published on Monday, November 17 that Republican candidate Kast “will present his ideas online about what we propose” if he reaches La Moneda. “This is the relevant victory,” he concluded.
The other three
Leif Magnus, 42, is a commercial engineer and leads the Chilean Rifle Association, founded in 2021 to promote the right to own guns responsibly. He helped create the PNL in La Araucanía. His name appeared in the press for the first time because he had been beaten by two individuals in March 2017, after leaving a nightclub in the municipality of Vitacura. He and his family were compensated 119 million pesos ($127,000) by the attackers. He has been part of several entrepreneurial companies, some created with family members. His brother Max, 41, is a lawyer and founding partner of a firm with experience in corporate matters. Ed Etzel, is an SEO specialist in Zurich, Switzerland, and founder of CryptoMondays in Chile.
