Essay , | 03/03/2025 : The Reactionary International

“Chainsaw! Aargh!” shouts Elon Musk, triumphantly brandishing the toothy, lurid red device that has just been handed to him by the President of Argentina, Javier Milei. Chainsaw noises drone from the loudspeakers and the crowd goes crazy. This bizarre stage show marked the “high point” of the right-wing Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which took place in Washington, D.C. at the end of February. During his 2023 presidential campaign, Milei made the chainsaw into a symbol for his policies of radical austerity and government cuts. Musk — who is currently demolishing US public services on behalf of the new Trump government — took up this symbolism at CPAC to garner adulation for himself and Milei from the international libertarian right, which is championing culture war and the eradication of social services worldwide. Milei had already conjured the prospect of a “right-wing international” at the CPAC meeting in Buenos Aires in December 2024. Besides CPAC, myriad other right-wing networks, think tanks, and foundations are devoted to realizing this notion.

Of international significance in this regard is the right-libertarian, ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation from the United States, which drew up a blueprint for the incoming government with its Project 2025. The foundation’s Mandate for Leadership document elaborates measures for the first 180 days of a projected Trump administration, meant to enable the speedy occupation of all the key positions of power. The aim is to undermine federal mechanisms for regulation and oversight, and to dismantle public administration and social welfare; at most, the state should be responsible for justice, defence, and internal security. The market should in turn be freed from every kind of limitation and regulate everything. For years, the Heritage Foundation was part of the right-libertarian Atlas network, which is now distancing itself from some of the Trump-affiliated, culturally authoritarian organizations.

Milei’s Argentina as Forerunner

One of the Heritage Foundation’s partners is the Argentinean Fundación Libertad y Progreso (Freedom and Progress Foundation), a long-standing partner of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, which has close ties to Germany’s FDP. The chair of the Fundación Libertad y Progreso’s academic council is the economist Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr, an influential Argentinian proponent of right-wing libertarianism and the intellectual mentor of the country’s current president.

Milei, who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist, has turned Argentina into a test-bed for right-wing libertarian politics since he took office in December 2023. As journalist Diana Cariboni’s analysis shows, many of the measures formulated in Mandate for Leadership have already been implemented in Argentina. The Heritage Foundation’s deputy chair, Derrick Morgan, presented Milei with a copy of this handbook at the CPAC in Washington in February 2024.

The CPAC was started in the USA in 1973, originally as an event for networking among conservative Republicans. Since 2017, the conference also happens outside of the USA, and plays an important role in connecting right-wing actors worldwide. There were five iterations of the CPAC in 2024, one in the USA and the others in Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. In terms of its political orientation, the conference is moving even deeper into the extreme right. In February 2025, Trump confidant Steve Bannon gave the Hitler salute at the end of his CPAC speech, which he concluded by yelling “Fight, fight, fight.” In 2024, Javier Milei was blustering that the “value of CPAC” is to “preserve our ideas, our spirit, our orientation, and our vision.” He sees the “right-wing international” that he invokes as including the governments of Argentina and the USA, Italy and Israel, as well as El Salvador and Hungary, with these forming the avant-garde of a cultural struggle waged from the right. This struggle is always directed against progressive social, ecological, feminist, and human rights–oriented policies, which get branded variously as wokeism, globalism, gender ideology, socialism, or cultural Marxism.

The Spanish Right and the Madrid Declaration

A similar tune was being played in Madrid, in May 2024, when the Spanish extreme right party VOX invited figures from the international right to an event called “Europa Viva 24”, part of their European electoral campaign. Milei and Chilean rightist José Antonio Kast appeared alongside Marine Le Pen, VOX chair Santiago Abascal, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

VOX is a Francoist party that was founded in 2013, and which — along with its related foundation Disenso — plays a pivotal role linking the European and Latin American far right. VOX refers to the Spanish-speaking countries, with a population of around 700 million people, as the “Iberosphere”, a “community of free nations”; they invoke a shared historical heritage, and try to cast imperialist colonialism in a positive light. In 2020, Disenso brought about the formation of the right-wing alliance Foro Madrid with a programmatic document, the Carta de Madrid (the Madrid Declaration in Defence of Freedom and Democracy in the Iberosphere). According to this declaration, wealth and progress are being threatened by communism, drug dealing, and totalitarian regimes, as well as by the Latin American left alliances Foro de Sao Paulo and Grupo de Puebla.

This declaration was signed by more than 150 political figures and pundits, including Milei, Argentine Vice President Victoria Villaruel, Kast, and Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazil’s former president. Foro Madrid holds yearly regional gatherings in Latin America — in Columbia in 2022, Peru in 2023, and Argentina in 2024. The participants focus on attacking the current centre-left governments in Brazil, Chile, Columbia, and Mexico, as well as the Spanish government, aiming to prepare the ground for political change in these countries.

In this sense, international conferences like CPAC and Foro Madrid are places to exchange regarding strategy and experiences. Such events foster networking and make it possible to mould the next generation of right-wing leaders and cadres. A prominent example of a policy move that is highly regarded by the international right is the Chilean campaign that led to the rejection of the progressive draft constitution in the 2022 referendum. José Antonio Kast, the founder of the Chilean Republican Party, has given presentations on this campaign, to training groups of selected young aspirants at multiple international meetings organized by Disenso, the Political Network for Values, and others.

Anti-Feminism as Lowest Common Denominator

The Political Network for Values (PNfV) is a network with high-ranking contacts in Europe, the United States, Latin America, and Africa, many of whom have a religious background. For instance, the new chair, Stephen Bartulica, belongs to the Catholic cadre organization Opus Dei. The PNfV organizes transatlantic right-wing summits, and is at least in part funded by governments. These summits have been held at the headquarters of the UN in New York and the Spanish senate building in Madrid in an attempt to give them an official veneer.

One of the PnfV’s main preoccupations is anti-feminism, which tends to be the lowest common denominator for binding together the assorted right-wing positions. Those questioning conservative gender norms or normative notions of the family, activists for LGBTIQ rights and for the right to abortion, are seen a threat to God- and/or nature-ordained order, and are also viewed by many as a threat to the biopolitical survival of their respective nations. In the case of PNfV — in keeping with its slogan, Life, Family, Freedom — promoting the traditional family model, defending private property, and boosting the birth rate are the top priorities. Conversely, reproductive and sexual rights are to be pushed back.

Thus the network petitions governments worldwide to sign the “Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family”, drawn up in 2020 by Hungary, Guatemala, Uganda, and other states, and which calls for banning abortion and strengthening traditional notions of the family. The PNfV also pursues the strategy of reinterpreting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in terms of the “protection of life from conception to natural death”.

Argentina as Torchbearer of the Right

The current discourse of the extreme right parties is also becoming increasingly hostile towards supranational institutions like the United Nations. Left-wing influence is seen lurking behind the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Pact for the Future. Argentina’s government is particularly vocal with these claims. At meetings of the PNfV and CPAC, Nahuel Sotelo, the Argentinian Secretary of State for Faith and Civilization, railed against the “ideologized left” that supposedly dominates the organs of the United Nations, and against NGOs like Open Society and Amnesty International, which directly interfere in the internal affairs of individual states. Argentina, on the other hand, Sotelo calls a “beacon for the world”, working together with the USA, Italy, Hungary, El Salvador, Ecuador and, should God provide, soon enough with Chile once again.

These ambitions are also reflected in the name chosen by the foundation connected to Milei’s party La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances): Fundación Faro, the “Lighthouse Foundation”. Its chair, author Agustín Laje, who has been promulgating right-libertarian anti-feminism for years now, announced after Trump was elected that the “true right” would now reveal its face. “What’s happening in Argentina and El Salvador shows us that it is not the centre that will defeat the left, but the right.”

The acting chair of Fundación Faro is Axel Kaiser Barents von Hohenhagen, a Chilean lawyer and philosopher from a German-Chilean family. He is the head of the Chilean think tank Fundación para el Progreso (Foundation for Progress). Axel Kaiser has been organizing book presentations and events with Javier Milei for years, and refers to the traditional Chilean right-wing coalition, Chile Vamos, as being centre-left and social democratic. His sister Vanessa Kaiser signed the Carta de Madrid. Meanwhile, his brother Johannes is overtaking José Antonio Kast from the right, and hopes to become President with his National Libertarian Party (PNL).

What about the AfD?

So far, AfD politicians have had a limited presence at international conferences of the extreme right. Trump’s victory, his cozying up to Putin, and the influence of Elon Musk could change this. X-head Musk’s online interview with Alice Weidel, co-chair of the AfD, and Musk’s video appearance at the AfD electoral campaign launch party in January, have put an end to the AfD’s isolation at a broader international level, and show international extreme-right networking has been part of the party’s toolkit for some time now.

In terms of collaborating with the Latin American right, what sticks out the most so far (apart from Waldemar Herdt’s Brazilian connections) are the von Storches: German-Chilean economist Sven von Storch, and his spouse Beatrix von Storch, vice-chair of the AfD’s parliamentary group. Both regularly attend “Marsch für das Leben”, a “pro-life” rally in Berlin, and are active in anti-abortion circles. Sven von Storch runs online petitions and news sites like Freie Welt and civil petition, which collaborate with the right-wing lobbying alliance Zivile Koalition and generate news and petitions favourable to the AfD line.

Sven and Beatrix von Storch — who for years headed the group of German-Brazilian parliamentarians in the Bundestag — are said to have close ties to Jair and Eduardo Bolsonaro. Born in Osorno in southern Chile, Sven von Storch is politically active there, and was a foreign policy advisor to then presidential candidate José Antonio Kast.

Now the von Storches have travelled to Washington for Trump’s inauguration, and were posting pictures of an “Official Hispanic Inaugural Ball 2025”. According to Sven von Storch, he liaised with Steve Bannon and other Trump associates, and claimed on Chile’s Radio Bío-Bío that he has been part of Donald Trump’s advisory team for more than seven years. He is supposed to have worked on strategic questions of the relationship between the USA, Latin America, and Europe, with Chile’s future always playing a role in the discussions. Soon, the campaigning for Chile’s presidential elections in November will begin. The result will be enormously important for the region — including deciding Chile’s future role within international right-wing cooperation.

Translated by Sam Langer and Chris Fenwick for Gegensatz Translation Collective.