Libertarian Johannes Kaiser Barents-von Hohenhagen jumped from YouTube to the Chamber of Deputies of Chile, delivering a far-right speech in which he promises to reduce the state, the massive expulsion of undocumented migrants, and to pull the South American country out of international organizations. He is pursuing the presidential sash in this Sunday's elections with a real chance of success.
Before his entry into politics, Kaiser was a content creator on YouTube, with videos criticizing the violence during the social outbreak of October 2019 in Chile and defending military personnel who were convicted of human rights violations during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), according to Noticias Argentinas, with reports from the Xinhua agency.
The 42-year-old politician of German descent also questioned women's right to vote and mocked the feminist movement within his cultural "war against progressivism", for which he had to apologize.
Kaiser entered Congress in 2022 with the Republican Party (PR) of the also far-right presidential candidate José Antonio Kast. However, he left this group, accusing it of acting in a conservative manner, and in response, he created the National Libertarian Party.
His departure from Kast's party was because in the failed second attempt by Chile to change the Constitution, led by the PR, the country was enshrined as a social democracy in the final project.
Similarly, he stated a month ago on TVN, Chile's public television, that he will withdraw the South American country from "many international organizations whose usefulness is not absolutely clear to me." For this reason, he also questioned the Chilean National Vaccination Plan, criticizing the number of doses administered to children and its scientific basis, which triggered a cross-sectional wave of detractors.
The latest polls place him between third and second place, a meteoric rise with real possibilities of reaching the runoff. In his campaign closing in Santiago, held last Wednesday, Kaiser stated on migration that "a country cannot receive more than two million people in seven and eight years".
