José Antonio Kast doesn’t want to seem like an extremist. In his third attempt to reach the Palacio de la Moneda, seat of the Chilean presidency, the leader of the Republican Party sought to remove the “ultra-right” label. With a campaign centered on a strong hand that ignored his admiration for dictator Augusto Pinochet and his traditionalist views on family, sexual diversity and abortion, Kast advanced to the second round and will compete for the position with communist Jeannette Jara. Now, if he wants to continue to present himself as a more moderate candidate than four years ago, he will have to continue to work to erase the traces of a trajectory marked by radicalism. Some of these leads lead to Spain, particularly its anti-abortion movement.
Kast was between March 2022 and December 2024 the president of the Political Values Network (PNfV), an international organization of self-proclaimed “pro-life” politicians founded in 2014 by former PP Interior Minister Jaime Mayor Oreja and his close associate Lola Velarde, also Spanish. Proof of the consolidated relationship is that NEOS, the foundation currently chaired by Mayor Oreja, published on X a message of “support” for his “great friend” Kast in view of the Chilean elections. “We trust that the principles of family, country and faith will shine again,” the tweet read.
A meeting point for politicians and activists from Europe, America and Africa, the main anchor of the PNfV is Spanish. Until 2022, the organization shared the CIF with the Valores y Sociedad Foundation, another initiative of Mayor Oreja, and only in 2022 was it established as an independent association. It is based in via Federico Agustí, in Madrid, and is registered in the National Register of Associations of the Ministry of the Interior.
Mayor Oreja held the top position of the Values Policy Network until 2019. Then did Katalin Novák, minister of Hungary, who ended up being president of the Hungarian country and a promising figure in Viktor Orbán’s regime, but who saw her career cut short in 2024 when she had to resign due to the scandal that led to the pardon of a man convicted of covering up for the director of a juvenile center who abused children.
After Novák he took command of the PNfV Kast, whose radical rejection of abortion, supported by his Catholic beliefs, was known. On television in 2017 he expressed his opposition to abortion even in cases of rape. “The rapes are all brutal. But does the child who is there have to pay for that brutality with death?” One of the interviewers asked him what he would advise his daughter. “I would not recommend abortion. I would never make them have an abortion, ever,” Kast responded. Among the ideas of the PNfV is that of considering abortion a “murder of innocents”.
In December 2024, Kast left the presidency of this organization, of which he had been a member since 2015. The Chilean was replaced by Croatian MEP Stephen Bartulica, from the Home and National Meeting party. In the Political Values Network, Kast met Spanish Mayor Oreja, founder and honorary president, Lola Velarde, executive director, and Javier Puente, who was a PP senator and is now a senior official in the Cantabrian government, as well as president of the Spanish organization Family and Human Dignity. During the Chilean campaign, Puente posted messages of support for Kast.
A summit in the Senate
A few days before leaving the post of president of the PNfV, in December 2024, this organization held an anti-abortion summit in the Spanish Senate, which became an exhibition of ultra-conservative and anti-scientific ideas. Mayor Oreja, now president of the NEOS network, defended the theory of divine creation against that of evolution in the Upper House. There have been voices in favor of the “ethnic continuity” of nations, warnings about the alleged “policies of replacement” through immigration, calls for women’s motherhood as the axis of their existence and many accusations against the “culture of death”, which is embodied in euthanasia and especially abortion.
Among the speakers were supporters of gay conversion therapy. The list of participants included George Peter Kaluma, a Kenyan MP who defended life sentence for homosexuals. However, after EL PAÍS published his background, his name disappeared from the list. On the board of directors of the Political Values Network, both today and in Kast’s time, other great figures of the Christian far right have appeared alongside Mayor Oreja, such as Sharon Slater, president of the International American Family Observatory, and Brian Brown, head of the International family organizationalso an American entity that promotes World Congress of Familiesa global quote against abortion and feminism.
Support Hazte Oir
Brown is a patron of Citizen Go, an organization chaired by Spaniard Ignacio Arsuaga, as well as Hazte Oír. Kast also has ties to Arsuaga. In 2019, the Chilean leader and his wife, lawyer Pía Adriasola, with whom he has nine children, visited Hazte Oír’s headquarters in Madrid, where they met Arsuaga and Luis Losada, another leader of the organization.
Kast supported two Arsuaga campaigns, which in turn are two classic causes of Hazte Oír and Citizen Go: one, which defended that “gender laws discriminate against men”, with the slogan “It’s not gender violence, it’s domestic violence”; another, who opposed the recognition of transsexuality, and who had achieved popularity by placing a bus on the streets of various cities whose side read: “Boys have a penis. Girls have a vulva. No to gender indoctrination”. In 2017, Hazte Oír had taken this bus to Chile, greeted by protests and clashes. Among its defenders was Kast.
Alliance with Vox
Kast, who in 2023 expressed criticism of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón’s invitation to the University of Chile, is aligned with Vox, a party he publicly supports. This is not a leader equidistant between the PP and Vox, but rather a member of the Latin American political family of Santiago Abascal and his people.
In 2019, he traveled to Madrid to meet the president of Vox and the party’s then-spokesperson at the party’s Congress, Ivan Espinosa de los Monteros. In 2022 he took a photo with Abascal and wrote: “With the future president of the Spanish government.” The following year he sided with Vox in the general July campaign. And in May 2024 he participated as a speaker at Madrid’s party festival called Viva 24, where he displayed a megaphone to honor Vox’s beginnings, when Abascal addressed a small audience through a similar one on a bank in the Los Remedios neighborhood of Seville. The megaphone, Kast said, is a symbol of the “rebellion” and “leadership” of Abascal, who was smiling in the front row. Kast insisted on an idea: when few believed in him, Abascal did, a similar recognition that Javier Milei, now president of Argentina, usually dedicates to him.
The biggest applause went to Kast when he called Chile and its surrounding countries “Hispanic America,” thus claiming Spanish heritage. “Our successes, hear it this way, are your successes,” Kast declared in front of the Madrid public, who attacked the “disastrous” government of Pedro Sánchez. “We’ll go get him,” he promised. And he added that, in his country, the leftist Gabriel Boric, a “political transvestite” who leads a “failed” cabinet like the “disastrous government of Salvador Allende”, heads an executive made up of “partners of Pablo Iglesias and Irene Montero and disciples of Íñigo Errejón”. The mere mention of those names elicited a hiss.
