He’s been called the “Gabriel Boric of the right”—maybe because, like Chile’s young president, he wears a beard and made a name for himself criticizing the country’s political establishment.
But Johannes Maximilian Kaiser Barents-von Hohenhagen, 49, objects to the comparison.
“I worked as a laborer, as a waiter, as a bond salesman, I’ve done a thousand different things,” Kaiser, a lawmaker in Chile’s lower house, told AQ. “[Boric] was a student activist, entered Congress and became president. He’s never worked a day in his life.”
Kaiser, who proudly describes himself as a “reactionary,” is now taking a turn in the spotlight after a recent poll showed him tied for the lead in October’s presidential election. He is the latest right-wing populist in Latin America to channel widespread frustration with crime, immigration and politics as usual, although his story has some distinctly Chilean twists.
Kaiser’s rise is a result of the backlash to Chile’s 2019 street protest movement, which for several years afterward seemed destined to remake the country’s politics in a new, more progressive mold—with proposed policies to reduce inequality, offer better pensions and produce a new constitution to replace the 1980 charter that dates from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Boric himself was elected in 2021 promising a crusade against neoliberalism and a new generation of Chilean leadership.
But the reform drive failed, with voters rejecting two proposed new constitutions, one mainly drafted by the left and the other by the right. Meanwhile, homicide rates, while still low by Latin American standards, have soared about 50% since 2018.
Kaiser was one of very few Chilean politicians who consistently opposed the whole process, and first gained recognition on YouTube for videos in which he condemned the Chilean left’s support of illegal migration and defended Chile’s quality of life improvements since the 1990s against widespread criticism of the inefficacy of the social safety net.
Today, his once-lonely stance looks vindicated in the eyes of many voters, only 20% or so of whom now say they support the goals of the protest movement, down from more than half six years ago. In an interview, Kaiser told AQ he believes the 2019 protests were a “color revolution” funded by Venezuela and Bolivia, and criticized the Chilean right for negotiating changes to the country’s constitution.
Kaiser transformed his YouTube following into a legislative seat in 2021. Last year he started a new party with a similar name to his YouTube channel. Now he thinks his next job might be president.
Boric is barred from running for a consecutive second term, and former center-left President Michelle Bachelet has bowed out of the race, leaving Boric’s interior minister, veteran figure Carolina Tohá, as the center-left’s leading candidate—though many voters may blame her for continued worries over public safety. Former right-wing candidate José Antonio Kast seems to be losing momentum to Kaiser in polls, while center-right politician Evelyn Matthei is performing well and has the backing of much of Chile’s political and business establishment.
From expatriate to deputy
Kaiser is the eldest son of a German-Chilean family. According to a recent profile in Chile’s La Tercera, he moved to Austria in the late 1990s and spent several years working various jobs in and out of the tourism industry and studying, without completing a degree.
Inspired by Ron Paul, the U.S. libertarian politician, Kaiser started a YouTube channel in 2013, as a hobby while running the night desk at a hotel, becoming an early critic of mass migration. Since then, immigration, largely from crisis-torn Haiti and Venezuela, has transformed Chilean society, with migrants making up some 9% of the population by the end of 2022, up from 2% in 2012.
When the protest movement struck in 2019, Kaiser happened to be back in Chile, visiting from Europe in September. His YouTube following tripled in the wake of the protests, to 90,000, he told La Tercera.
“In those days there practically didn’t exist a voice for those of us who were resisting,” Kaiser told AQ. “And those of us who had YouTube channels or social media platforms became the voice of those who didn’t see themselves represented, not even by the political right.”
Not living in the country freed him to be firmer in his stance, he said: “If I had been in Chile making these criticisms, I would have been attacked, maybe physically.”
A right turn for the Chilean right
Chile’s entire political class has had to make adjustments to the shifting public mood. Boric has had to settle for more modest tweaks such as a recent reform to the pension system.
Meanwhile, the right has become more intransigent. After José Antonio Kast broke from the establishment UDI right-wing party to found the more staunchly conservative Republicanos in 2019, he ran for president in 2021, facing Boric in a runoff.
Kaiser had just won a legislative seat as part of Kast’s Republicanos, with the help of his YouTube following. But he resigned from the party in the leadup to the runoff, after controversy over his comments questioning whether women should have the right to vote. (Kaiser said to AQ that the remarks were taken out of context.)
Rejoining the party in Congress after Kast’s loss, Kaiser broke with Republicanos again in January 2024 to found his own National Libertarian Party, now with six members in the lower house, championing a purer conservatism.
Kaiser’s break with Republicanos paralleled Kast’s own earlier break with UDI, said Tomás Gold, an expert on Latin American right-wing movements at Brown University. “He said, ‘We are doing the same thing again, we are negotiating with the left.’”
Kaiser had objected to Republicanos’ close involvement in the writing of Chile’s second constitutional proposal, by a body elected under gender parity rules.
“Political rights are individual, not collective,” Kaiser told AQ. “You can’t have gender parity in election outcomes.”
“Kaiser has emerged as the purer right-wing candidate,” said Patricio Navia, professor at NYU and Chile’s Diego Portales University.
His outsider background seems to boost his credibility in the eyes of many supporters. Chile’s right-wing establishment is linked to the country’s business elites and the Catholic Church, but Kaiser is Orthodox and has criticized elements within Chile’s business community.
“Sometimes, certain economic interests aren’t interested in having economic freedom,” Kaiser told AQ. “Some groups prefer short-term stability and aren’t able to see the medium and long-term impact.”
Kaiser’s future
As president, Kaiser said, “The first priority would be to take on crime … control the borders, and expel immigrants who are here illegally.”
He has refused to compete with the mainstream Chile Vamos right-wing grouping in a primary against Evelyn Matthei, a center-right politician seen as the front-runner for the 2025 election.
He cited the group’s support for Boric’s recent pension reform, which raises mandatory contributions to individual savings accounts, with part of the increase going to a “state protection fund” and to improving women’s pensions.
“How can we support a reform that violates workers’ property rights over their contributions?” he told AQ. “Chile Vamos violated property rights.”
He may go instead to a primary with Kast, over whom he has a lead in current surveys. That could set up a three-way race between Matthei, Tohá and Kaiser.
“He could make it to a runoff,” said Navia. “But I don’t see Kaiser winning a presidential election in Chile.”
Kaiser thinks his chances are better than that.
“That would provide us with a chance for success,” he told AQ about the possibility of a three-way race. “We think we can win that campaign, and that’s what we’re working toward.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Burns
Reading Time: 5 minutesBurns is editor and social media manager at AQ.
