Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across Latin America has fundamentally altered the region's ideological landscape over the past decade, demanding renewed scholarly attention to the mechanisms by which such movements entrench themselves beyond individual electoral cycles. Brazil, the region's largest democracy and its most economically consequential state, has emerged as a critical case study in this phenomenon. Jair Bolsonaro's presidency from 2019 to 2022 represented not merely an electoral anomaly but the culmination of longer-term shifts in Brazilian civil society, media ecosystems, and institutional trust. The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America by Ahead of Print engages directly with the central question that has animated much of the post-Bolsonaro scholarly discourse: does the defeat of a far-right leader at the ballot box constitute a meaningful reversal of the political forces that elevated him, or does the ideological infrastructure remain intact, waiting for its next expression? This question carries profound implications not only for Brazil but for the comparative study of democratic resilience, civil society mobilization, and the structural conditions that sustain authoritarian populism.
The article's analytical contribution lies in its careful distinction between electoral performance and ideological consolidation. Bolsonaro's loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022 was, by any conventional political science metric, a significant democratic moment — the first time a sitting Brazilian president failed to win re-election. Yet the authors resist the temptation to read electoral defeat as ideological collapse. Bolsonaro received over 49 percent of the vote in the second round, a figure that reflects a broad social coalition rather than a narrow personality cult. The research questions the article addresses — how the far-right movement emerged and how it has consolidated beyond the presidency — are precisely the right ones, because they direct analytical attention away from the person and toward the structural and cultural substrates of the movement. Far-right alignment in Brazil, as the article demonstrates, is not reducible to Bolsonaro's individual charisma or his particular policy positions; it is embedded in networks of evangelical Christian communities, military nostalgia, agrarian business elites, and a digitally organized base that has proven highly resistant to top-down demobilization.
Understanding this consolidation requires situating it within the broader trajectory of Brazilian political economy since the Workers' Party governments of the early 2000s. The Lula and Dilma Rousseff years produced significant gains in poverty reduction and social inclusion through flagship programs such as Bolsa Família, yet they also generated substantial resentment among middle-class Brazilians who experienced the costs of redistributive policy without feeling its direct benefits, and among conservative constituencies who viewed the PT's cultural agenda as a threat to traditional values. The economic crises of 2015 and 2016, combined with the Lava Jato corruption investigations that swept across the political class, devastated public confidence in the established left and center-left parties. This was the vacuum into which Bolsonaro stepped — not as a builder of a new coalition from scratch, but as an aggregator of pre-existing grievances. The article's framing of "beyond electoral fortunes" is thus analytically precise: the movement's consolidation predated the 2018 electoral victory and has outlasted the 2022 defeat, suggesting a durability rooted in social and cultural transformation rather than in the contingencies of any single campaign.
From the perspective of ODA policy and international civil society engagement, the persistence of this far-right alignment carries significant practical implications. Brazil under Bolsonaro witnessed a dramatic contraction of space for environmental civil society organizations, indigenous rights groups, and human rights monitors, with international development partners facing mounting difficulties in sustaining partnerships with Brazilian counterpart organizations. The return of Lula has partially reopened this space, most visibly through Brazil's reassertion of its international climate commitments and the reconstitution of environmental enforcement agencies. However, the article's findings suggest that donors and international partners should resist assuming a linear restoration of the civil society environment that existed prior to 2019. The social forces that supported Bolsonarismo remain organized, vocal, and politically active; they have demonstrated capacity to contest municipal and state-level elections, to mobilize in the legislature, and to exert pressure on Lula's governing coalition from the right. International civil society organizations operating in Brazil must therefore develop engagement strategies that account for a persistently polarized domestic environment rather than one in which a coherent democratic consensus has been restored.
Looking forward, the scholarly and policy significance of this article extends well beyond Brazil's borders. The consolidation of far-right alignment that it documents is part of a global pattern in which movements that lose national-level elections nonetheless retain the organizational infrastructure, the media ecosystems, and the cultural legitimacy to contest subsequent cycles. From Trumpism in the United States to the National Rally in France to various configurations of nationalist-conservative politics across Central and Eastern Europe, the evidence increasingly suggests that electoral defeat is a necessary but insufficient condition for the reversal of far-right consolidation. For researchers in comparative politics and development studies, this demands methodological attention to the extra-electoral dimensions of political alignment — to churches, social media networks, business associations, security sector loyalties, and family-based transmission of political identity. For practitioners in ODA and civil society development, it reinforces the importance of long-term programmatic commitments that survive changes in national government, and of investment in the resilience and independence of local civil society actors who must navigate polarized political environments regardless of who holds executive power. Brazil's ongoing democratic negotiation between a restored left government and a consolidated far-right social movement will remain one of the most consequential political laboratories of the coming decade, and scholarship of this quality — attentive to structural depth over electoral spectacle — is precisely what the field requires to make sense of it.