Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the globe has fundamentally reshaped how scholars and practitioners understand democratic consolidation, party systems, and the resilience of populist ideologies in the aftermath of electoral setbacks. Brazil presents one of the most instructive and consequential cases in this global wave. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 was widely analyzed as a product of unique conjunctural factors — deep institutional crisis, the imprisonment of Lula da Silva, widespread disgust with the Workers' Party following the Lava Jato corruption investigations, and a fragmented party system susceptible to outsider capture. Yet the more revealing and analytically urgent question, which the article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America now addresses, is not how Bolsonaro rose to power but why his ideological project has demonstrated such remarkable durability well beyond his 2022 electoral defeat. This question carries significant implications not only for Brazil but for the comparative study of right-wing populism in emerging democracies across Latin America and beyond.
The article centers on two interlocking research questions: how Bolsonaro's far-right movement consolidated itself during his presidency, and what mechanisms have allowed this ideological alignment to persist as a viable and organized political force even after losing executive power. These questions resist easy answers because conventional theories of populism tend to treat such movements as personalist and therefore inherently fragile — dependent on the charisma and electoral fortunes of a single leader. If Bolsonarismo were merely a personality cult, the 2022 defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the subsequent political and legal pressures on Bolsonaro himself should have produced fragmentation and decline. Instead, the evidence suggests something more structurally durable: an ideological coalition with organizational depth, sustained social bases, and the capacity to reproduce itself through institutional channels including congress, state governments, the military establishment, evangelical networks, and agribusiness federations. The article thus contributes to a growing literature on what scholars have begun calling the "institutionalization of populism" — the paradox of a movement defined by anti-institutional rhetoric nonetheless constructing durable political infrastructure.
Understanding this consolidation requires situating it within broader transformations in Brazilian society and the regional political economy. The Bolsonaro phenomenon did not emerge in a vacuum but rather reflects deeper structural shifts: the weakening of labor-linked party identities, the exponential growth of evangelical Protestantism as a political constituency, the organizational power of the rural commodities sector, and the fracture of center-right parties unable to offer coherent alternatives following the Temer administration's legitimacy collapse. These structural conditions provided a receptive environment for an ideological project that fused social conservatism, anti-communism, pro-market rhetoric, nationalism, and security-state valorization into a coherent if internally contested worldview. Critically, this project found institutional expression not only through Bolsonaro's presidency but through the so-called "Centrão" dynamic in Brazil's congress, where far-right legislators embedded themselves across committee structures, budgetary allocations, and federal oversight mechanisms. The article's focus on consolidation rather than emergence thus correctly identifies the more consequential phenomenon: a structural transformation of Brazil's political right that will outlast any individual electoral cycle.
From a comparative and policy-oriented perspective, the Brazilian case raises important questions about what instruments of democratic resilience are actually effective against far-right consolidation. The Lula administration's victory was celebrated internationally as a restoration of democratic normalcy, and the January 8, 2023 attacks on federal institutions — Brazil's own echo of the Capitol insurrection — were ultimately suppressed without triggering institutional collapse. Yet the Bolsonarista congressional bloc remains formidable, constraining the Lula government's legislative agenda and signaling that electoral defeat does not translate into political marginalization. For development practitioners and ODA researchers, this has direct relevance: governance programs, civil society strengthening initiatives, and democratic institutionalization funding must grapple with the reality that the political ground on which they operate is contested not just electorally but ideologically. Far-right consolidation affects the regulatory environment for civil society organizations, the receptivity of national governments to international human rights frameworks, and the stability of policy commitments in areas from environmental governance to gender equality — all domains central to development cooperation in the Brazilian context.
Looking forward, the analytical framework offered by this article invites researchers and practitioners to resist both excessive pessimism and premature optimism about democratic trajectories in Brazil and across the region. The far-right alignment documented here is neither omnipotent nor ephemeral; it is a structured political force with genuine societal roots that must be engaged rather than dismissed or waited out. Comparative work across Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, and other Latin American cases suggests that far-right movements with strong organizational bases and cross-sectoral alliances demonstrate a pattern of reconstitution after electoral setbacks — adapting their messaging, exploiting governance failures of incumbent progressive governments, and re-entering electoral competition in strengthened form. For IOCSS and the broader research community, the imperative is to develop more granular empirical frameworks for tracking ideological consolidation as distinct from electoral performance, to study the civil society and media ecosystems that sustain these movements between elections, and to assess what conditions — institutional design, civil society density, economic performance, counter-narrative capacity — most effectively moderate their long-term influence. Brazil's experiment in the coming years, under Lula's third administration facing a structurally entrenched opposition, may well become the definitive laboratory case for these questions.