Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-05-30
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the globe has emerged as one of the defining challenges to liberal democratic governance in the twenty-first century. From Hungary to India, from the United States to France, electorally successful radical-right coalitions have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to reshape institutional norms, polarize civil societies, and reconfigure the architecture of state power in ways that outlast any single electoral cycle. Brazil, under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro from 2019 to 2022, became one of the most consequential laboratories for this global phenomenon. The country's size, its complex federal structure, its history of military rule, and its vibrant but fragile democratic institutions made the Bolsonaro experiment particularly instructive for scholars of comparative politics and development. A recent article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America turns its attention not merely to the rise of Bolsonarismo but to its durability — analyzing how the ideological project survived its author's electoral defeat in 2022 and what that consolidation means for Brazilian democracy going forward.
The central analytical contribution of the article lies in its refusal to treat electoral outcomes as the definitive measure of a political movement's vitality. The authors pose two interrelated research questions: how did the far-right alignment coalesce under Bolsonaro's leadership, and what mechanisms allowed it to persist beyond his loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the October 2022 runoff? This is a methodologically significant framing, because much of the existing scholarship on populist right-wing movements tends to conflate the fate of a leader with the fate of the movement itself. The Brazilian case challenges that conflation directly. Bolsonaro may have departed for Florida in January 2023, refusing to attend the presidential inauguration, but the coalition he assembled — spanning evangelical Christian networks, agribusiness sectors, military sympathizers, and segments of the security forces — did not dissolve. The article argues that these structural alignments, forged through years of cultural mobilization, institutional capture, and rhetorical consolidation, represent a qualitatively different and more durable phenomenon than ordinary electoral politics.
Understanding this consolidation requires attention to the political economy of the Brazilian far right. Bolsonarismo was never simply a product of economic grievance, though the prolonged stagnation and inequality that characterized the mid-2010s certainly provided fertile ground for its emergence. The movement drew its organizational strength from a triangulation of economic libertarianism, social conservatism, and militaristic nationalism — each element appealing to distinct constituencies while being united by a shared hostility toward the Workers' Party (PT) and its associated civil society networks. The agribusiness sector, representing one of Brazil's most economically powerful blocs, found in Bolsonaro a reliable defender of frontier expansion, deforestation-friendly regulations, and opposition to Indigenous land rights. Evangelical churches — now accounting for roughly a third of the Brazilian population — contributed organizational infrastructure, affective communities, and moral legitimacy. This coalition was not accidental; it reflected decades of structural transformation in Brazilian society and economy that created new stakeholders resistant to the redistributive and participatory agenda that the PT had championed during the Lula and Dilma years. The article's analysis of this coalition-building process helps explain why electoral defeat alone was insufficient to unravel it.
From a comparative and global perspective, the Brazilian far-right consolidation speaks directly to debates about democratic backsliding and the limits of electoral recovery. The literature on democratic erosion, associated with scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, has distinguished between outright democratic collapse and the more insidious phenomenon of competitive authoritarianism, in which formal institutions persist but are hollowed out by executive aggression, judicial manipulation, and the intimidation of civil society. Brazil under Bolsonaro did not cross into authoritarianism in the classical sense, but it exhibited multiple features of democratic stress: attacks on the Supreme Court, the politicization of the military, the systematic weakening of environmental oversight bodies, and the delegitimization of electoral institutions that Bolsonaro himself would later claim had defrauded him. That these tendencies survived into the post-Bolsonaro era — in the form of continued congressional influence by his allies, persistent social media mobilization, and the January 8, 2023 riots that echoed the January 6 events in the United States — suggests that ODA researchers and civil society practitioners must grapple with the durability of institutional damage even after democratic restoration. Civil society organizations that depend on state funding or regulatory permissiveness to operate are particularly vulnerable during such periods, and the Brazilian case illustrates how quickly the enabling environment for civic participation can deteriorate.
For policy-makers and development practitioners, the implications of this analysis are consequential and somewhat sobering. International development frameworks, including those anchored in the Sustainable Development Goals and in bilateral ODA agreements, have increasingly incorporated governance, civil society strengthening, and democratic accountability as core pillars. The assumption embedded in much of this programming is that elections provide reliable inflection points — that a change of government signals a change in the political environment for civil society and human rights. Brazil's recent trajectory complicates that assumption. The Lula government has made genuine efforts to restore environmental protections, re-engage with multilateral institutions, and rebuild social programs dismantled under Bolsonaro. Yet the far-right bloc retains significant legislative power, and the social and cultural transformation wrought by years of polarization cannot be reversed by executive decree. Development actors working in Brazil, whether focused on Amazon conservation, gender equality programming, or community-level governance initiatives, must contend with a political landscape in which formal democratic restoration coexists with deep societal and institutional contestation.
The scholarly significance of this article extends beyond Brazil's borders. At a moment when far-right movements are competing for power or consolidating influence across Latin America — with figures like Javier Milei in Argentina and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador attracting global attention — the Brazilian case offers a theoretically rich and empirically grounded framework for understanding how ideological movements build durable infrastructure. The key insight is that consolidation happens not primarily through electoral victories but through the capture of intermediary institutions: the judiciary, security forces, religious organizations, and media ecosystems. Future research would benefit from comparative analysis across these cases, examining whether the mechanisms identified in Brazil — coalition triangulation, institutional infiltration, affective mobilization through social media — are replicated elsewhere and whether they produce similarly durable alignments after electoral setbacks. For civil society researchers, the question of organizational resilience in the face of far-right consolidation is equally urgent: understanding how civic actors adapt, survive, and sustain advocacy under pressure from hostile political coalitions is one of the defining research agendas of the current moment. Brazil, in this sense, is not an exception to global trends but one of their most instructive expressions.