Johannes Kaiser (49, Santiago) is the presidential candidate stranger of the right. It could be said that his political career began at the reception of a hotel in Austria, when he worked as a night caretaker. He spent hours watching YouTube channels until he decided to start his own. In 2016 he gave it the name The National Libertarianwhere he targeted the progressive ideas that were being discussed in Chile, in issues such as education or immigration. Without having completed his university studies in Law and without having exceeded the age of 40, his communication skills and his radical ideas were echoed by a handful of tens of thousands of followers. A decade later, he is a deputy and candidate for president of the National Libertarian Party, a formation he founded at the beginning of the year and which has found a space further to the right than that of the republican José Antonio Kast, especially in the cultural battle and in the defense of the legacy of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). His YouTube channel is still there, but with a warning: “If I don’t post it’s because I’ve been censored.”
Kaiser’s first appearances in the local press came on the occasion of the 46th anniversary of the coup against socialist Salvador Allende in September 2019. He was one of 60 signatories of a full-page ad on Mercury header with title: On September 11, 1973, Chile was saved from being what Venezuela is today. The media presented him as the brother of lawyer Axel Kaiser, popularizer of far-right ideas and president of the Foundation for Progress, close to Javier Milei. A few weeks later, Johannes Kaiser visited Chile at the height of the social uprising and used his channel to provide a counter-intervention to the uprisings. “We didn’t have roads, but we had networks,” he said The third. His followers tripled, but they complained that he talked so much, without doing anything. His response was to run for parliament in 2021 for the Republican Party, from Kast, and he was elected.
Twice he left the ranks of the Republican Party. The first, even before assuming the office of deputy, for some statements in which he asked whether it was a good idea for women to gain the right to vote, in an ironic way, he said. The second and last occurred in 2023, during the second constituent process, dominated by Republican members. Before the plebiscite, Kaiser acknowledged that he would vote against, an option which he ultimately won, as he believed that too many concessions had been made to the left, which was punished within his party’s ranks and he ultimately resigned.
With a strategy based on stretch the elastic of right-wing extremist discourse and a good performance in the debates, the libertarian presidential candidate managed to gain several points of support in the final stretch from the ultra-conservative Kast, who he considers “center-right.” In recent weeks, before polling was banned, Kaiser had placed third and was just four points behind Kast, with 15.6%. He confessed that he did not imagine entering into a dispute for second place with the Republican, taking it for granted that the bet of the left, Jeannette Jara, would go to the runoff, as all the polls indicate.
Regarding the differences with the republican formation, Kaiser said: “The class struggle has been replaced by the struggle between minorities, and we are against it. And the Republican Party, at least in the second constitutional process, did not recognize these new axes”, and that libertarians gather liberal political theory and, to a certain extent, elements of conservative political theory, to merge it into their project. “We go very deeply into a sector that we might call voters disenchanted with the political system,” he said. The Free. Among his supporters is Augusto Pinochet Hiriart, the eldest of the dictator’s five sons.
But the differences were evident during the campaign. While Kast decided to omit his positions against freedoms such as abortion, same-sex marriage or his defense of the Pinochet dictatorship, Kaiser showed his radicalism on all fronts. He is against the cause of rape for termination of pregnancy and has said that he will “without a doubt” support a new coup and that he will apply a general pardon or an amnesty law for prisoners in Punta Peuco, the prison for human rights violators of the dictatorship, where 139 former men in uniform between the ages of 60 and 94 are held. He also pledged to remove Chile from the Escazú Agreement, Agenda 2030, the Paris Agreement and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. He is in favor of the application of the death penalty – repealed in Chile in 2001 – for those who, in addition to hitmen, commit crimes such as rape and kidnapping resulting in death. It is for the mass expulsion of undocumented migrants, including children.
His most strident and charismatic style, his speech anti-establishment and his conservative, nationalist ideas and a State reduced to its minimum expression have forced the comparison with Milei. “I am not Milei or Bukele,” he said The thirdarguing that these are leaderships that are only understood in the context of their countries. “The measures are another thing,” he observed. His brother Axel, defender of the Milei government, with whom he has a close bond, said that his brother candidate is the one who would best embody a libertarian government and that it is a phenomenon very similar to what happened with Milei in Argentina, to what happened with Trump, to what happened with Bolsonaro in Brazil and to what is happening in Europe with various right-wing movements. “And the elites of the traditional right and left do not live or communicate as if they are suffering like the rest of the citizens,” he said.
If it wasn’t enough for the libertarian to get through to the second round and Kast wins the election, he declared that his party is not willing to compromise on the “red lines” and “burn the trust of citizens in exchange for a position in the government.” Among the impracticable things he cited lowering taxes, eliminating all housing contributions, reducing the size of the state and various institutional reforms.
