Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across liberal democracies has emerged as one of the defining challenges of early twenty-first century politics. From Hungary to India, from the United States to Italy, populist leaders channeling nativist grievances, anti-establishment sentiment, and authoritarian nostalgia have not merely won elections but have reshaped the ideological terrain of their respective polities in durable and consequential ways. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro represents perhaps the most analytically instructive case in Latin America — a country that had long been heralded as a success story of democratic consolidation and social-democratic governance suddenly pivoting toward a political project that combined militarism, evangelical social conservatism, neoliberal economics, and aggressive anti-institutionalism. What makes the Brazilian case particularly salient for scholars of political economy and civil society is not simply that Bolsonaro won the presidency in 2018, but that the ideological coalition he assembled appears to have outlasted his tenure, persisting well beyond his narrow electoral defeat in 2022. Understanding this phenomenon matters not only for Brazilian democracy, but for practitioners and researchers grappling with the structural drivers of democratic backsliding across the Global South.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes a theoretically significant contribution by disaggregating the question of far-right electoral performance from the question of far-right ideological consolidation. This is a crucial distinction that much of the existing literature on populism and democratic erosion has failed to draw adequately. Electoral fortunes are inherently contingent — they respond to economic cycles, candidate quality, coalition dynamics, and the administrative performance of incumbents. Ideological consolidation, by contrast, refers to the degree to which a political project succeeds in restructuring the informational, institutional, and cultural environment in which future political competition takes place. The article's central claim — that Bolsonarismo has achieved precisely this kind of consolidation despite losing the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — challenges triumphalist narratives about the resilience of Brazilian democracy. The fact that Bolsonaro came extremely close to victory, that his movement retained substantial congressional representation, and that large segments of the Brazilian military and evangelical church remain aligned with his worldview suggests that Lula's return to power represents a temporary partisan correction rather than a structural reversal of the ideological shift Bolsonaro catalyzed.
The consolidation of a far-right alignment in Brazil cannot be understood without accounting for the structural conditions that produced it. The collapse of the PT-led developmentalist model after 2013, the politicization of the Lava Jato corruption investigation, the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and the economic stagnation that followed created a crisis of political legitimacy that advantaged anti-system actors. Bolsonaro did not simply fill a vacuum — he actively constructed a new political identity for a heterogeneous coalition that had previously lacked organizational coherence. This coalition includes evangelical Christians alarmed by secularizing social norms, agribusiness elites and security forces seeking regulatory relief and protection from accountability, and a large informal working class that had grown disillusioned with both PT clientelism and the corruption scandals that discredited the entire political establishment. The ideological glue holding this coalition together is not a coherent programmatic agenda so much as a set of affective and symbolic commitments — to military values, traditional family structures, anti-communism, and a conspiratorial worldview that portrays democratic institutions as instruments of elite manipulation. This affective dimension of Bolsonarismo is what makes it resistant to conventional policy-based critique and why electoral defeat alone cannot dissolve it.
The implications of this analysis extend well beyond Brazil's borders and carry significance for ODA practitioners and international civil society organizations operating in the region. Development finance institutions and bilateral donors have in recent years increasingly tied aid and investment to democratic governance conditionalities, and the Brazilian trajectory illustrates the limits of this approach when the erosion of democratic norms is driven not by state fragility but by politically organized social forces. International support for Brazilian civil society organizations — particularly those working on human rights, environmental governance, and indigenous peoples' rights — was severely disrupted during the Bolsonaro years, as the government systematically delegitimized NGOs and foreign-funded civil society actors as agents of a globalist agenda. The persistence of this anti-civil society framing in Brazilian political discourse, even under the Lula administration's more favorable orientation, means that international partners cannot assume a stable operating environment. Research into how civil society organizations in Brazil have adapted their legitimation strategies, funding structures, and community engagement models in response to sustained hostility from state actors would provide valuable practical guidance for practitioners working in analogous contexts across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.
Looking forward, the analytical framework developed in this article — distinguishing electoral outcomes from ideological consolidation — deserves broader application as a tool for monitoring democratic health in transitional and consolidating democracies. For researchers, the Brazilian case opens productive questions about the mechanisms through which far-right movements embed themselves in institutions: through judicial appointments, through changes in military culture, through curriculum reform in public education, and through the systematic cultivation of alternative media ecosystems that insulate supporters from mainstream information environments. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society space, the lesson is that political risk assessments must be recalibrated to take seriously the possibility that democratic reversals can consolidate at the level of political culture and social identity even when progressive parties return to formal executive power. The trajectory of Brazil in the years ahead — particularly as the 2026 electoral cycle approaches and Bolsonaro's legal standing and political rehabilitation remain live questions — will serve as a critical test case for whether democratic institutions can contain and eventually reverse a far-right alignment that has achieved deep societal roots, or whether the country faces a prolonged period of polarized instability with consequences that will ripple throughout South American regional governance and international civil society.