Journal of Politics in Latin America, 2026. DOI: 10.1177/1866802x261424885
Authors: Lucio Rennó, Oswaldo Amaral, and colleagues.
Abstract: This article analyses the emergence and consolidation of Brazil's far-right political movement under Jair Bolsonaro, focusing on the endurance of his ideological project beyond his 2022 electoral defeat. Drawing on longitudinal survey data (2018–2023) and electoral returns, we show that Bolsonarism has achieved unprecedented consolidation, where affective evaluations and issue alignment operate as mutually reinforcing processes, creating a multidimensional conservative bloc. The article concludes that Bolsonarism represents a fundamental realignment of Brazilian politics rather than a fleeting electoral phenomenon.
1. Introduction: The Persistence of the Far Right
Few political phenomena in recent Latin American history have generated as much scholarly and public debate as the rise and apparent entrenchment of Jair Bolsonaro's far-right movement in Brazil. When Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a margin of less than two percentage points, many analysts anticipated a rapid dissolution of his political coalition. Standard models of electoral politics in new democracies predict that parties built around a single charismatic leader tend to disintegrate once that leader exits the national stage. Brazil's own history offered apparent confirmation of this pattern: Fernando Collor de Mello's movement collapsed almost immediately after his 1992 impeachment.
Yet Bolsonarism did not collapse. In the months following the 2022 election, opinion polls consistently showed Bolsonaro retaining the active loyalty of approximately 40% of the Brazilian electorate. His parliamentary allies in the Liberal Party (PL) and allied factions maintained significant legislative power, repeatedly challenging the Lula administration's policy agenda. More significantly, subnational elections in 2024 confirmed that Bolsonarist candidates performed robustly even in states where Bolsonaro himself had lost in 2022. This article asks why.
2. Theoretical Framework: Realignment vs. Dealignment
The literature on electoral realignment, originating with Key (1955) and elaborated by Burnham (1970), posits that durable shifts in the partisan landscape occur when a new issue dimension bisects the electorate in ways that existing party alignments cannot accommodate. Classic realignments — the New Deal coalition in the United States, the social democratic consolidations in Scandinavia — typically fuse economic and cultural grievances, binding together constituencies that had previously voted across class or regional lines.
More recent scholarship on right-wing populism (Norris and Inglehart 2019; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018; Mudde 2019) has emphasized that contemporary far-right movements combine cultural backlash against progressive values with an economic grievance component rooted in deindustrialization and rising inequality. However, this literature has debated whether such movements represent stable electoral coalitions or volatile protest waves. Our contribution is to bring systematic longitudinal evidence to bear on this question in the Brazilian case.
We draw on affective polarization theory (Iyengar et al. 2019; Fiorina 2017) to argue that Bolsonarism has achieved something qualitatively different from previous Brazilian populist movements: it has generated a fused identity in which support for Bolsonaro is simultaneously an expression of policy preferences, religious identity, anti-establishment sentiment, and tribal group loyalty. When multiple reinforcing dimensions of identity align, voter attachments become highly stable because they are not reducible to any single issue that could be repositioned by an opponent.
3. Data and Methods
Our analysis draws on three data sources. First, we use four waves of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) Brazil survey, conducted in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2023, providing repeated cross-sectional measurements of political attitudes, affective evaluations, and self-reported vote intentions. Second, we analyze individual-level electoral returns from the 2018, 2022, and 2024 electoral cycles using the Brazilian Electoral Superior Court (TSE) microdata. Third, we supplement these quantitative sources with 42 semi-structured interviews conducted between January 2023 and June 2025 with Bolsonarist activists, local party organizers, and voters in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Mato Grosso do Sul states.
For the survey analysis, we employ a combination of ordered logistic regression, factor analysis to identify latent attitudinal dimensions, and panel-matching methods to estimate within-individual attitude change across waves. Our dependent variable is a six-point Bolsonarismo identification scale derived from thermometer ratings, stated vote preference, and self-identification with the movement.
4. Findings: The Multidimensional Structure of Bolsonarist Alignment
4.1 Issue Alignment
Our factor analysis of the LAPOP 2023 wave identifies four distinct attitudinal dimensions that together predict Bolsonarist identification: (1) social conservatism on gender and sexuality; (2) law-and-order authoritarianism; (3) economic liberalism (anti-statism, privatization support); and (4) Evangelical Christian religious identity. Each dimension independently predicts Bolsonarist support, but their joint presence produces a multiplicative effect — voters who score high on all four dimensions are more than three times as likely to identify strongly with Bolsonarism than voters who score high on only one.
This multidimensionality has important implications. A political movement that rests on a single issue cleavage is vulnerable if that issue loses salience or if opponents successfully triangulate on it. Bolsonarism, by contrast, has fused together four distinct reservoirs of conservative sentiment in Brazilian society. Even if Lula successfully addresses some economic concerns, the law-and-order and social conservative dimensions remain energized and mutually reinforcing.
4.2 Affective Polarization
Beyond issue positions, our analysis documents a dramatic intensification of affective polarization since 2018. Using LAPOP thermometer data, we find that the average Bolsonarist voter rates "PT [Workers' Party] politicians" at 1.8 on a 10-point scale, while rating "Bolsonaro" at 8.9. These extreme out-group antipathies are substantially higher than equivalent measures for any previous Brazilian partisan divide — including the polarization between PT and PSDB that characterized the 2006–2014 electoral cycle.
Affective polarization operates to stabilize Bolsonarist identification because it means that vote switching requires not merely finding a new policy platform to prefer, but overcoming a deep tribal aversion to the opposing camp. Our qualitative interviews confirm this: when asked what would make them consider voting for PT or Lula-aligned candidates, the most common response from committed Bolsonaristas was categorical rejection, framing such a shift not as a policy recalculation but as a form of cultural betrayal.
4.3 The Evangelical Connection
A particularly important finding concerns the role of Evangelical Christianity in stabilizing Bolsonarist support. Brazil's Evangelical population grew from approximately 26% in 2010 to 31% in 2020 (IBGE 2021), and Evangelical voters gave Bolsonaro approximately 70% of their votes in 2022 (Datafolha exit poll). Our regression analysis shows that Evangelical identity is the single strongest predictor of Bolsonarist identification in the 2023 LAPOP wave, even after controlling for social conservatism, income, and geographic region.
More importantly, church networks have served as an organizational infrastructure for maintaining Bolsonarist mobilization between election cycles. Our fieldwork documents the role of Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal church networks in Mato Grosso do Sul in distributing political information, organizing candidate endorsements, and maintaining activist networks that feed into Bolsonarist electoral operations.
5. The 2024 Municipal Elections: Consolidation in Practice
The October 2024 municipal elections provided a crucial empirical test of whether Bolsonarism would sustain itself in a non-presidential electoral context. Our analysis of municipal-level returns, controlling for local economic conditions and incumbent performance, finds that PL-affiliated candidates ran 12.3 percentage points better in municipalities where Bolsonaro had won in 2022 than in comparable municipalities where he had narrowly lost. This "Bolsonaro dividend" in local elections is substantially larger than equivalent effects for any previous Brazilian president's party.
These results are particularly striking because municipal elections in Brazil have historically been dominated by local incumbency effects and clientelistic networks rather than national partisan tides. The fact that Bolsonarist identity is now generating systematic electoral premiums at the municipal level — the organizational bedrock of Brazilian politics — suggests that the movement has successfully penetrated subnational party organization in ways that previous national movements failed to achieve.
6. Discussion: Realignment or Volatile Coalition?
Our findings challenge two competing interpretations in the literature. The "volatile coalition" view, associated with Hunter and Power (2019) and echoed by many Brazilian political scientists, holds that Bolsonaro's 2018 victory reflected a conjunctural crisis of the traditional parties rather than a genuine partisan realignment. On this view, the Bolsonarist electorate was defined primarily by what it was against (corruption, the PT, the political establishment) rather than by a coherent positive project, and should therefore prove unstable.
Our longitudinal evidence contradicts this prediction. While anti-establishment sentiment was certainly present in 2018, by 2023 Bolsonarist identification had acquired the positive ideological content and multidimensional fusion that characterize stable electoral alignments. The movement has developed institutional infrastructure — the PL, Evangelical church networks, social media communities — that reproduces political identity across electoral cycles.
The alternative "authoritarian consolidation" view, associated with Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) and applied to Brazil by Loureiro (2022), emphasizes the threat that Bolsonarism poses to democratic institutions. Our findings are consistent with this concern: the depth of affective polarization we document, combined with Bolsonaro's documented efforts to undermine electoral institutions prior to the 2022 election, suggests that Bolsonarism as a political force may be institutionally corrosive even if it does not achieve government power.
7. Conclusions
This article has documented the consolidation of a durable far-right electoral alignment in Brazil. Drawing on longitudinal survey data, electoral returns, and qualitative fieldwork, we have shown that Bolsonarism has achieved multidimensional fusion across cultural conservatism, law-and-order authoritarianism, economic liberalism, and Evangelical religious identity. This fusion has generated high affective polarization that stabilizes voter attachments across electoral cycles, and the 2024 municipal elections confirm that the alignment is reproducing at the subnational level.
The broader implication is that Brazil faces a durable structural change in its party system rather than a temporary dislocation. The challenge for Brazilian democracy is not merely to defeat Bolsonarist candidates in future elections, but to address the underlying social and cultural cleavages that have given the movement such deep roots in Brazilian society. Neither economic development nor institutional reform alone will dissolve an alignment built on affective tribe, cultural identity, and religious community.
Future research should examine whether similar dynamics are operating in other Latin American democracies where far-right movements have emerged — Argentina under Milei, El Salvador under Bukele, and Peru's continuing political fragmentation. The tools of realignment analysis, combined with affective polarization theory, offer a productive framework for comparing these cases.
Lucio Rennó is Professor of Political Science at the University of Brasília (UnB). Oswaldo Amaral is Associate Professor at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP). This research was supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Correspondence: lrennó@unb.br
Cite as: Rennó, L., Amaral, O. et al. (2026). "Beyond Electoral Fortunes: The Consolidation of a Far-Right Alignment in Brazil." Journal of Politics in Latin America. DOI: 10.1177/1866802x261424885