Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements has emerged as one of the defining challenges of contemporary democratic governance. From Hungary and Italy to the United States and India, right-wing populist formations have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to outlast their electoral peaks, embedding themselves within institutional structures, civil society organizations, and cultural imaginaries in ways that conventional political science has struggled to fully account for. Brazil offers one of the most instructive cases in this regard. The rise and apparent persistence of Bolsonarismo — the ideological and political project associated with former President Jair Bolsonaro — presents a phenomenon that transcends the individual fortunes of a single leader. The article under examination in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes a significant scholarly contribution by shifting analytical attention away from the electoral cycle and toward the structural consolidation of a far-right alignment in Brazilian politics, a reframing that carries substantial implications for how researchers and practitioners understand democratic backsliding in Latin America and beyond.
Bolsonaro's 2018 election represented a rupture in Brazilian politics that many observers initially attributed to conjunctural factors: the deep economic recession following the commodity boom, the delegitimization of the Workers' Party through the Lava Jato corruption investigations, and widespread social exhaustion with the political establishment. These explanations, while not inaccurate, risked treating Bolsonarismo as an essentially reactive formation — a protest movement that would dissipate once its grievances were addressed or its leader removed from power. The article's central argument challenges this reading. By focusing on the endurance of Bolsonaro's ideological project beyond his 2022 electoral defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the study directs analytical attention to the organizational, sociological, and ideological infrastructure that sustained the far-right alignment even in the absence of executive power. This is a crucial analytical move. It suggests that what consolidated in Brazil between 2018 and 2022 was not merely a government but a political bloc with its own identity, networks, and long-term strategic capacity.
The article's examination of consolidation raises important questions about the relationship between electoral competition and ideological reproduction in contemporary democracies. A political movement that retains substantial legislative representation, commands loyalty from significant segments of the security forces and agribusiness sector, and maintains a dense ecosystem of digital media and religious community networks does not simply vanish when it loses a presidential election. In Brazil's case, Bolsonarismo demonstrated its staying power immediately after the 2022 result, with mass protests questioning the legitimacy of the electoral outcome and, most dramatically, with the January 8, 2023 storming of the Presidential Palace, National Congress, and Supreme Court — events whose structural logic closely paralleled the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol. The comparative resonance here is not incidental. Far-right movements operating within democratic institutional frameworks have developed a shared repertoire of contestation that blurs the line between electoral participation and anti-democratic mobilization, and Brazil's trajectory illustrates this dynamic with unusual clarity.
From the perspective of ODA and civil society scholarship, the consolidation of Brazil's far-right alignment carries implications that extend well beyond domestic politics. During the Bolsonaro years, Brazil witnessed a systematic assault on the institutional architecture of environmental governance, indigenous rights protection, and civil society engagement in public policy. International development partnerships dependent on state cooperation — whether in Amazonian conservation, public health infrastructure, or anti-poverty programming — faced significant disruption. More broadly, the Bolsonaro government's hostility toward international human rights norms and multilateral institutions reflected a wider trend in which far-right governments use the instruments of sovereignty to insulate domestic political economies from external accountability mechanisms. For development scholars and practitioners working in the tradition of participatory governance and rights-based approaches, the Brazilian case is a cautionary study in how quickly hard-won institutional gains can be eroded when political conditions shift and how the erosion persists structurally even after a change in government. The Lula administration has had to invest enormous political capital in reconstituting agencies, reengaging international partners, and rebuilding the normative frameworks that were dismantled between 2019 and 2022.
Looking forward, the analytical framework offered by this article points toward several productive lines of inquiry for researchers and policy practitioners alike. First, the question of how democratic systems can build institutional resilience against far-right consolidation — not merely against individual authoritarian leaders — deserves sustained attention. Brazil's experience suggests that constitutional checks, while necessary, are insufficient on their own; the ideological infrastructure of Bolsonarismo survived the institutional defeats its leadership suffered in the courts and at the ballot box. Second, the role of religious networks, particularly evangelical communities, in anchoring far-right political alignments in Latin America remains undertheorized and deserves comparative investigation across the region. Third, for civil society scholars, the Brazilian case raises urgent questions about the conditions under which non-state actors can function as democratic counterweights to authoritarian consolidation, rather than as vectors of its advancement. As Brazil navigates an uncertain political transition, the scholarly contributions assembled in this article provide essential grounding for anyone seeking to understand not only what happened under Bolsonaro, but what the far-right alignment he consolidated means for Brazilian democracy in the years ahead.