Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The rise of far-right political movements across the democratic world has emerged as one of the defining challenges of the early twenty-first century, forcing scholars, policymakers, and civil society actors to reckon with the structural conditions that allow such movements to entrench themselves even after electoral setbacks. Brazil offers perhaps the most instructive case study in the Global South. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 was widely interpreted at the time as a symptom of democratic backsliding, a conjunctural response to the collapse of the Workers' Party (PT) coalition amid the Lava Jato corruption scandals and the economic turbulence of the mid-2010s. Yet the persistence and organizational vitality of Bolsonarismo well beyond its candidate's 2022 defeat suggests something far more consequential is taking place: the consolidation of a durable ideological alignment capable of surviving the vagaries of electoral competition. This reality demands careful analytical attention not only from Latin Americanists but from all scholars engaged with questions of democratic resilience, ODA effectiveness, and the political economy of development.
The article under examination published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America directly addresses this consolidation thesis by centering two research questions that have been undertheorized in the existing literature: first, how did a political project rooted in the personality of a single figure develop an organizational and ideological infrastructure capable of outlasting electoral defeat; and second, what are the mechanisms through which far-right alignment reproduces itself across institutional and societal domains? These are questions of deep structural significance. The authors resist the temptation to treat Bolsonarismo as merely a variant of global populism or as an idiosyncratic Brazilian anomaly. Instead, they situate the movement within the longer arc of Brazilian conservatism, tracing ideological lineages through the military dictatorship period, the religious-nationalist currents of evangelical Protestantism, and the agrarian and security sectors that have historically shaped Brazilian political economy. By doing so, the article advances a more textured understanding of how far-right consolidation occurs: not through a single charismatic rupture, but through the progressive convergence of previously fragmented conservative constituencies around a coherent ideological framework.
This analysis carries significant implications for how we understand political realignment in emerging democracies more broadly. The Brazilian case challenges two dominant interpretive frameworks. The first is the personalist model, which attributes far-right success primarily to the appeal of individual leaders and therefore predicts movement collapse upon electoral failure. The second is the crisis model, which treats far-right surges as reactive phenomena triggered by acute economic downturns or institutional scandals, implying that structural stabilization will produce normalization. The Brazilian evidence complicates both. Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, yet Bolsonarismo retained substantial parliamentary representation, continued to dominate subnational governance in key states, and maintained a mobilized social base across evangelical congregations, agricultural federations, and law enforcement networks. This suggests that the movement has crossed a threshold from electoral vehicle to embedded political alignment, a qualitative transformation that demands new analytical frameworks beyond vote-share analysis. For development scholars and ODA researchers, this matters enormously: governance conditions, civil society space, and institutional accountability mechanisms in Brazil are now shaped by a political force that will not simply recede when its figurehead fades.
The regional and global dimensions of this consolidation deserve equal attention. Brazil does not exist in isolation. The far-right alignment documented in this article is part of a transnational network of movements and ideas that includes Trumpism in the United States, Vox in Spain, the AfD in Germany, and related formations across Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. These movements share ideological features — anti-institutionalism, cultural nationalism, hostility to multilateral frameworks — that directly bear on international development architecture. For institutions engaged in ODA and civil society support, far-right consolidation in major recipient or partner countries creates a distinctly challenging operating environment. Civil society organizations that serve as implementing partners for development programs face shrinking space, legal harassment, and delegitimization campaigns. Multilateral commitments on gender equality, environmental governance, and human rights — all central to contemporary ODA conditionality — are contested or actively undermined by governments aligned with far-right ideological projects. Brazil under Bolsonaro saw withdrawal from international climate commitments, systematic attacks on indigenous land rights, and attempts to defund civil society organizations receiving international support. Even under the Lula restoration, the structural conditions that enabled Bolsonarismo remain operative, and any future political transition could rapidly reconfigure the policy environment for development partnerships.
For practitioners and researchers working at the intersection of civil society, governance, and international cooperation, the consolidation thesis developed in this article points toward several urgent directions. First, it reinforces the importance of long-cycle political economy analysis in ODA programming. Project designs that assume a stable or liberalizing institutional environment in countries like Brazil are poorly calibrated to the actual political risks present. Second, it highlights the need for more sophisticated civil society mapping that accounts for the ideological landscape within which partner organizations operate — including the growth of far-right civil society formations that instrumentalize development discourse for nationalist ends. Third, and most fundamentally, it challenges researchers to develop more robust theoretical accounts of democratic consolidation and backsliding that can explain why formal electoral competition does not, by itself, determine the ideological direction of governance. The endurance of Bolsonarismo is not a failure of Brazilian democracy in the procedural sense; elections occurred, power transferred, institutions functioned. It is a challenge to democratic culture and to the civil society infrastructure that sustains it. For IOCSS and the broader community of scholars engaged with global political economy, this case is not merely a Latin American story — it is a paradigmatic instance of the tensions that will define the development landscape for the decade ahead.