by Frank Christian Hansel
Bukele, Milei, Kast—and now De la Espriella: The search for a post-progressive political model.
First El Salvador in Central America, then Argentina and Chile in the south, now Colombia in the north of Latin America—and on the other side of the Atlantic, Italy and Spain: everywhere, political actors are emerging who come from different traditions and yet speak almost the same language.
Javier Milei speaks of liberty and the necessary culture war, batalla cultural; José Antonio Kast of order, family, and national self-assertion; Nayib Bukele demonstrates that a state can reclaim lost territorial authority; Giorgia Meloni proves that one can govern on nation, family, and Western identity; and Santiago Abascal is organizing these ideas across the Spanish-speaking world.
With Abelardo de la Espriella’s political breakthrough in Colombia, another president joins the ranks—one in whom several of these strands converge. His public “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” therefore carries signal value: this is not the pious exclamation of a religious president, but the question of whether a new political synthesis is taking shape. El País described the inauguration in Cali as nothing less than a “cumbre de la derecha,” a summit of the Latin American Right: what manifested itself at his swearing-in was an entire milieu—one for which Milei declared, on the spot, that the “winds of history” were once again blowing in the direction of freedom.
No International—but a Political Family
To speak of a “Right-wing International” would be premature. Milei is not Kast, Kast is not Bukele, Meloni is not a libertarian radical, and Colombia is neither Italy nor Argentina. Yet precisely these differences make the phenomenon interesting: what is emerging is less a centrally directed movement than a political family that, facing different national crises, diagnoses strikingly similar problems: the loss of state authority, sprawling bureaucratization, a culturally estranged political class, loss of control over migration and public security, the weakening of traditional institutions—and a progressive cultural hegemony that long determined which terms and positions counted as legitimate at all. They are our problems, too.
The answers differ, but they revolve around the same five concepts: liberty, property, order, nation, cultural identity. Chile’s Emol summed up the common ground soberly: economic liberalism, a smaller state, opposition to the Latin American Left. Precisely therein lies the charm of this new axis: it joins together what the traditional Right long kept apart.
Milei: The Return of Liberty
Javier Milei embodies the economic revolt. His opening question is not how the state might administer better, but why it administers so much in the first place. Where traditional center-right parties often offer merely a more efficient version of the existing state, Milei challenges its very size; government spending, subsidies, and regulation appear in his framework not as technical questions but as questions of power. His triad—life, liberty, property—ties into the liberal tradition; his formula: The world saves itself by shrinking the state to enlarge society.
Yet economic reform alone is not enough: whoever merely balances budgets without changing the intellectual premises of politics can win a government, but not an era. That is why Milei speaks so insistently of the batalla cultural: good governance alone, as Argentina’s presidency itself documents, is not sufficient—the cultural battle is necessary. For him, politics begins before politics: with concepts, moral convictions, the image of man. “Ideas win wars,” he declared at the founding of the Fundación Faro. The results, meanwhile, are speaking for themselves: inflation at its lowest level since 2018, a fiscal surplus, and even the IMF applauding.
Kast: Liberty Needs Order
Chile’s José Antonio Kast strikes a different note. His central message—“Sin orden, no hay libertad,” without order, there is no liberty—is almost the complementary answer to Milei. For liberty does not exist in a vacuum; it requires a state capable of enforcing the law, controlling its borders, and guaranteeing public safety. Kast thereby contributes what libertarian movements occasionally lack: a sense of institution, authority, family, and national continuity. Milei asks how much state the citizen needs; Kast asks which state he needs. In both cases, the answer is a limited but capable one.
Bukele: The State Must Be a State Again
Nayib Bukele takes this argument to its outermost point: a state that does not control its territory and cannot protect its citizens loses its most elementary legitimacy. For years, El Salvador was an extreme example of rule by criminal structures; Bukele’s answer was not seminars on the root causes of violence but state power—mega-prisons, military pressure on armed groups, the demonstrative reconquest of territorial authority. This has earned him massive approval and, at the same time, substantial rule-of-law criticism; that ambivalence is part of the picture: those who have lived through years of real insecurity judge state toughness differently than societies in which safety is taken for granted.
The lesson stands: a state has no moral authority if it fails at its most basic tasks. Milei says the state must shrink. Kast says the state must be ordered. Bukele says the state must be able to enforce. Argentina’s La Nación recently captured this family formation in a headline: “From the Lion to the Tiger.”
De la Espriella: The Synthesis
And then comes Colombia. In Abelardo de la Espriella, several of these strands converge: free-market criticism of the state, a pronounced security agenda, patriotic language, a traditional understanding of the family, and an explicitly Christian cultural self-definition.
The closeness to Milei is not an analogy but documented political practice. Shortly before the runoff, the two spoke by phone in full public view; Milei called the election a contest between liberty and “impoverishing communism,” declaring that the region’s fuerzas de la libertad stood behind De la Espriella—who promptly published the call himself. After the victory, Milei traveled to the inauguration in Cali. Already during the campaign, El País had run a piece titled “De la Espriella y la receta Milei”—and the parallels are striking: the outsider against the political establishment, aggressively personalized social-media communication, anti-left polarization, economic liberalism, the culture war. In his inaugural address, he announced fiscal discipline, tax cuts, and a hard security policy; Reuters reports plans to shrink the state apparatus by up to forty percent and to revive oil, gas, and, where necessary, fracking. Structurally, that is Milei terrain. And that De la Espriella explicitly labels his own governing project a batalla cultural—adopting Milei’s core concept—is hardly a coincidence.
Yet De la Espriella is no Colombian Milei. Culturally, he often stands closer to Kast: order, nation, the traditional family, the republican-patriotic vocabulary. Kast, in turn, has long belonged to the same network: he sent congratulations declaring that “una nueva etapa de libertad para Colombia” was beginning—even using De la Espriella’s own formula, “Firme por la Patria”; for the inauguration he traveled to Cali and held a bilateral meeting immediately beforehand on security, trade, and democracy. On security, much recalls Bukele: the uncompromising rhetoric, the claim that the state must reclaim its territorial authority. His first weeks in office have followed that script—airstrikes on FARC dissident fronts in Guaviare, drawing immediate criticism, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio is expected in Colombia in early September to reset relations with Washington. And over all of this, De la Espriella lays a genuinely Colombian layer—religion, patriotism, and the experience of a country confronted for decades with guerrillas, cartels, and the loss of territorial control.
That is why “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” reaches far beyond personal piety. It did not stop at a general appeal to Western values: El País describes a new Catholic-Evangelical alliance that regards the government as an opportunity for a batalla cultural over family, abortion, and gender issues in particular. The exclamation goes beyond Milei’s “¡Viva la libertad, carajo!” It adds an explicitly religious-civilizational dimension to the libertarian discourse of freedom and signals the return of a language that progressive politics believed it had banished from the public square—religion, nation, duty, family, authority. Not as state dogma—that would hardly be compatible with a pluralist constitutional order—but once again as a legitimate part of political self-description. Reduced to a formula: De la Espriella is Milei plus Kast plus Bukele—translated into Colombia’s Catholic-patriotic symbolism.
Meloni: From Protest Movement to Governing
On the European side of this axis, Giorgia Meloni performs a different function: she shows that such a movement can complete the passage from opposition to government. Protest parties live off never having to answer for the consequences of their demands; governing parties cannot. Meloni had to learn that radical diagnosis and realistic governance are two different things. She attempts to combine conservative identity politics, national interests, and Western alliance reliability—and answers the decisive question of power: can cultural opposition become institutional leadership?
Abascal: The Transatlantic Infrastructure
With VOX and the circles around the Foro Madrid, the Spanish Right has for years been working systematically to expand the ties between Europe and Latin America—historically consistent, for Spain and Hispanic America share a common language, a common cultural memory, and a political public sphere far more tightly interwoven than it often appears from a U.S. vantage point. Ideas and concepts therefore travel fast; the batalla cultural is understood in Madrid just as it is in Buenos Aires, Santiago, or Bogotá. The Foro Madrid itself speaks of a new Ibero-American phase—and has just held its fifth regional meeting, on September 3–4, 2026, in Santiago de Chile, of all places: Milei opened it, Kast closed it, delegations from more than 25 countries attended, the United States among them. Kast’s closing line could serve as the motto of this entire essay: “The real challenge is to govern well and to deliver what we promised.” The network’s keywords are liberty, sovereignty, security, private property, Western civilization, and anti-socialism. The exchange no longer runs through parties alone but through social media, conferences, entrepreneurs, and think tanks. Something genuinely transatlantic is emerging—not an organization, but an infrastructure.
And Trump? Catalyst, Not Author
Seen from Washington, this wave can look like an American export. American Greatness recently cheered the shift under the headline “Trump Is Righting Latin America”; Trump endorsed De la Espriella in the Colombian runoff, and in March 2026 he gathered a dozen heads of state—Bukele and Milei among them—at the “Shield of the Americas” summit in Doral to coordinate the fight against the cartels. The momentum is real, and so is the template: border enforcement, national pride, economic freedom, traditional values. And yet Trump is best understood not as the author of this process, but as its most powerful catalyst. Bukele rose out of El Salvador’s insecurity, Milei out of Argentina’s inflation, De la Espriella out of Colombia’s experience of territorial loss—national crises, not American instructions. The movement has its own intellectual infrastructure in the Spanish-speaking world and its own vocabulary; the batalla cultural needs no American license. Here, too, lies the quiet difference of the European approach—compatible, but not derivative: it counts less on a single leader and more on ideas, parties, and institutions. Where Washington tallies election victories, Madrid and Rome ask what will hold once the victors have to govern.
The Truly New Element: Liberty and Conservatism Reunite
The most important development, however, lies deeper. For decades—in Europe as in Latin America—the Right was split into two camps: on one side, economic liberals who defended markets, competition, and individual freedom but often remained culturally indifferent; on the other, conservatives who defended nation, family, tradition, and order but at times thought in astonishingly statist terms about the economy. The new axis attempts to overcome that split. Its implicit chain of argument runs: property needs liberty; liberty needs order; order needs legitimacy; legitimacy needs cultural attachment. And cultural attachment does not grow out of administrative regulations, but out of history, family, religion, language, homeland, and social loyalty. Therein lies the real challenge for the political center: this new Right no longer presents itself merely as the guardian of a fading past—it offers a model of the future.
Not Restoration, but Counter-Hegemony
That distinguishes it from classical conservatism, which was traditionally defensive and wanted to preserve. This new Right wants to change things. Milei does not want to restore the Argentina of 1995; Bukele does not want to return to the El Salvador that preceded his presidency; Meloni does not describe Italy as a museum; De la Espriella’s batalla cultural is aimed explicitly at the future. These movements do not present themselves as the last defenders of a vanishing order but as a counter-hegemony. What they are saying, in essence, is that the progressive era was not the end of history; its concepts are not beyond alternative, its institutions are not sacrosanct, its moral categories are not laws of nature—and its results may be audited. That is exactly where their dynamism comes from: not restoration, but the attempt at a political new beginning.
The Risks Belong to the Truth
There are, however, political risks: justified criticism of bureaucracy can turn into contempt for state institutions; the need for order can turn into authoritarian temptation; patriotism into nationalism, cultural self-assertion into exclusion, and the contest with progressive hegemony into the attempt merely to replace one hegemony with another. The decisive test of this new Right therefore lies not in winning elections, but in preserving liberty and order at the same time. A Right that sacrifices liberty to impose order contradicts its own promise; a Right that weakens the rule of law to strengthen the state destroys the foundation of state legitimacy; and a Right that can generate identity only through enemy images and ultimately lacks a strong, positive vision of society of its own. On this line, a political new beginning parts ways with mere reaction. That holds true on both sides of the Atlantic!
The Charm of the New Axis
And yet this southern transatlantic constellation possesses a peculiar charm—not because Milei, Kast, Bukele, Meloni, Abascal, or De la Espriella have identical answers, but because they are once again asking questions that established politics long believed it no longer had to ask. How big may a state become? What does it owe its citizens? What holds a society together? Can liberty endure without property—can it endure without security? Can democracy exist without a national public sphere? What role do family, religion, and cultural memory play? And who, in fact, decides which political questions may still be asked at all?
The charm thus lies less in a finished ideology than in the reopening of the space of political possibility. After decades of technocratic there-is-no-alternative politics, politics returns as a decision; after years of a cultural one-way street, dissent is stirring again. In that sense, we are not simply witnessing a shift to the right, but the end of a political certainty: the progressive paradigm no longer automatically holds cultural interpretive authority, classical liberalism no longer automatically holds the economic kind—and the traditional Right is no longer confined to the defensive role of the preserver.
Out of these shifts, something new is emerging. Milei supplies the liberty, Kast the order, Bukele the state authority, Meloni the ability to govern, Abascal the transatlantic network—and De la Espriella is attempting to fuse liberty, nation, security, family, and religion into a new Latin American synthesis. Whether a lasting paradigm will grow out of this remains open. But one thing can already be seen: the political Right is rediscovering the courage not merely to protest against the present, but to formulate a vision of the future. Perhaps that is precisely the charm of this new transatlantic axis.
Frank Christian Hansel is a long-standing AfD politician with a background in political science, public administration after reunification, business consulting, and sustained leadership roles within the AfD both locally in Berlin and at the federal level. His political career includes executive party roles and parliamentary functions in the Berlin State Parliament.
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2026/09/08/the-charm-of-the-new-transatlantic-axis-of-the-right/
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