Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-12
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements has reshaped the landscape of democratic governance in ways that scholars and policymakers are still struggling to fully comprehend. From Europe to North America to Latin America, the rise of populist, nationalist, and authoritarian-leaning formations has challenged longstanding assumptions about democratic consolidation, civil society resilience, and the durability of liberal institutional frameworks. Brazil presents one of the most instructive — and in many respects alarming — case studies in this regard. The trajectory of Jairismo, the ideological and political movement crystallized around former President Jair Bolsonaro, offers a lens through which to examine how far-right politics can take root, survive electoral defeat, and potentially reconstitute itself as a durable force within democratic systems. The article under review in the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses precisely this phenomenon, asking not merely how Bolsonaro rose to power in 2018, but how his political project managed to consolidate itself as something beyond the personal fortunes of a single candidate.
The central analytical contribution of this study lies in its insistence that Bolsonarismo should not be understood solely through the lens of electoral volatility or individual charisma. Much of the initial academic and journalistic commentary on Bolsonaro's rise treated it as a contingent product of Brazil's institutional crisis — the aftermath of the Petrobras corruption scandal, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and the incarceration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — that removed the Workers' Party from competitive contention in 2018. On this reading, Bolsonaro was an opportunist who filled a vacuum rather than the leader of a coherent ideological movement. The article challenges this interpretation by demonstrating that beneath the noise of Bolsonaro's personal provocations, a more structured political alignment was taking shape, one that drew on pre-existing networks of evangelical Christianity, agrarian elites, military culture, and economic libertarianism. This coalition proved capable of outlasting its founding electoral moment, continuing to exercise influence on Brazilian politics even after Bolsonaro's narrow defeat to Lula in October 2022 and his subsequent flight into exile in the United States.
What makes this analysis particularly valuable for scholars of comparative politics and democratization is its attention to the organizational and societal substrates of far-right consolidation. The article interrogates the mechanisms through which Bolsonarismo reproduced itself at the subnational level, through state governorships, congressional seats, municipal networks, and above all through cultural and religious institutions. The evangelical church, in particular, emerges not merely as a constituency for the far right but as an infrastructural resource — providing communication channels, legitimacy frameworks, and mobilization capacity that extend well beyond campaign seasons. This institutionalization is significant because it suggests that the far-right alignment in Brazil is not merely a reaction to economic grievance or institutional dysfunction, but a positive project with its own worldview, social base, and organizational logic. The implication is that the defeat of Bolsonaro at the ballot box in 2022 represented a setback for this project, not its termination.
The broader regional and global context lends additional urgency to these findings. Across Latin America, the wave of left-wing governments that many analysts celebrated as a "second Pink Tide" — encompassing Lula's return in Brazil, Gabriel Boric in Chile, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and others — has confronted persistent far-right opposition that has proven adept at using legal and institutional means to constrain progressive governance. In Argentina, the election of Javier Milei in late 2023 demonstrated that far-right libertarian populism retains considerable electoral potency even in contexts of economic crisis, contradicting the assumption that neoliberal austerity automatically discredits right-wing candidates. The Brazilian case thus sits within a wider regional pattern in which far-right movements are learning to operate as permanent features of the political landscape rather than as episodic reactions to specific crises. For civil society organizations and international development actors working in the region, this has concrete implications for programming around democratic governance, civic space, and human rights — all of which have faced significant headwinds under far-right administrations and their legislative allies.
From a policy and research standpoint, the article raises important questions about the limitations of electoral benchmarks as indicators of democratic health. If a far-right alignment can lose an election and yet retain sufficient organizational capacity to constrain, harass, and potentially destabilize a successor government — as the January 8, 2023 attacks on Brazil's governmental institutions demonstrated — then conventional measures of democratic consolidation based on electoral alternation are clearly insufficient. Researchers working on democratic backsliding, ODA conditionality frameworks, and civil society resilience need conceptual tools that capture these dynamics more adequately. The study implicitly calls for greater analytical attention to the sociology of political movements as distinct from the sociology of voting behavior — asking not only who votes for far-right parties, but who organizes for them, who funds them, who provides their ideological content, and who protects them when they face accountability.
Looking forward, the consolidation of the far-right alignment in Brazil will be one of the defining variables in Latin American politics through at least the remainder of this decade. The outcome of Brazil's 2026 elections will be a critical test of whether Bolsonarismo can reconstitute itself as an electoral force with new leadership — potentially figures such as Governor Tarcísio de Freitas of São Paulo — or whether it will settle into a role as a permanent veto player within Brazilian democracy, capable of blocking transformative policy even without executive power. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society sector, the lesson is that building resilient democratic institutions requires investing not only in formal governance structures but in the broader civic ecosystem — media independence, judicial integrity, educational institutions, and the associational fabric of civil society — that sustains democratic culture against authoritarian challenge. The Brazilian experience suggests that far-right movements are capable of learning and adapting; the scholarly and policy communities that work to defend democratic governance must be equally adaptive in their analysis and response.