Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-16
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the globe has become one of the defining features of contemporary democratic life. From Hungary to Italy, from India to the United States, ideological formations once considered marginal have secured substantial electoral bases, restructured governing coalitions, and — crucially — demonstrated a remarkable capacity to outlast the electoral fortunes of their founding figures. Brazil's experience under Jair Bolsonaro represents perhaps the most instructive and analytically rich case of this phenomenon in Latin America, and the article under review in the Journal of Politics in Latin America offers a timely and rigorous examination of how bolsonarismo has evolved from a campaign vehicle into a durable ideological alignment capable of surviving its founder's 2022 electoral defeat. Understanding this trajectory is not merely an academic exercise: it carries profound implications for the study of democratic backsliding, civil society resilience, and the long-term prospects for legitimate governance across the Global South.
The central contribution of this article lies in its refusal to treat Bolsonaro's defeat in the 2022 presidential election as the terminal event of a far-right episode. Where many observers interpreted Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's narrow but symbolically significant victory as a democratic restoration — a verdict by the Brazilian electorate against authoritarian populism — the article instead asks a more difficult and ultimately more revealing question: what happens to a far-right political project when it loses but does not disappear? The authors pursue two interconnected research questions that together constitute a coherent intellectual architecture. First, they examine the organizational and institutional consolidation of bolsonarismo as a movement distinct from the man himself. Second, they interrogate the ideological consistency and social embeddedness of this alignment, asking whether it represents a stable constituency or a volatile and contingent coalition. These are precisely the right questions, because they shift the analytical lens from electoral outcomes — which are always temporally bounded — toward the deeper structures of political alignment that persist across election cycles and, in many cases, across generations.
What emerges from this analysis is a picture of a far-right movement that has done something genuinely novel in Brazilian political history: it has constructed a cross-cutting social bloc that bridges evangelical Christian communities, rural agribusiness interests, segments of the military and security apparatus, and a significant portion of the urban lower-middle class that felt economically and culturally displaced by the PT-led governments of the 2000s and 2010s. Each of these constituencies entered the bolsonarista alignment for overlapping but distinct reasons, and the ideological glue that holds them together — a fusion of social conservatism, anti-institutionalism, and a particular brand of economic nationalism dressed in neoliberal rhetoric — has proven more coherent and more durable than critics expected. The article's emphasis on the consolidation of this alignment, rather than its mere emergence, is analytically significant: consolidation implies institutionalization, the development of organizational capacity, and the normalization of the movement's core ideas within the broader political culture. This is precisely what makes bolsonarismo a structural phenomenon rather than a fleeting expression of anti-establishment anger.
From the perspective of comparative politics and development studies, Brazil's case connects to wider regional trends that have reshaped the landscape for civil society, official development assistance, and international cooperation. Across Latin America, the past decade has witnessed a contestation between two distinct political projects: a center-left developmentalism associated with the Pink Tide and its residual institutions, and an ascendant right that combines market orthodoxy with cultural nationalism and hostility toward multilateral governance. In countries like Ecuador, Peru, and Argentina, this contestation has produced severe governance instability that directly impairs the operating environment for civil society organizations and undermines the effectiveness of ODA flows. Brazil's scale — it is the largest democracy in Latin America, the ninth-largest economy in the world, and a critical node in global supply chains for agriculture and extractive industries — means that its political trajectory has asymmetric consequences for regional order. A far-right alignment that remains competitive in Brazil does not simply affect Brazilian citizens; it shapes the configuration of regional politics, influences positions within multilateral forums such as MERCOSUR and the United Nations, and determines the conditions under which international development cooperation can be effectively deployed. The article's attention to the post-electoral consolidation of bolsonarismo is therefore a contribution not only to Brazilian political science but to the broader field of development governance.
For researchers and practitioners working in the fields of civil society support, democratic assistance, and international development, the policy implications of this analysis are both sobering and clarifying. The persistence of a well-organized far-right alignment in Brazil signals that progressive governance under Lula is structurally constrained in ways that formal electoral mathematics do not capture. Civil society organizations that depend on state recognition, legal protection, or funding in sectors such as environmental advocacy, Indigenous rights, and LGBTQ+ inclusion operate in an environment in which a substantial portion of the legislature, the judiciary's conservative flank, and subnational governments remain aligned with bolsonarista ideological priorities. International donors and ODA architects who assume that Lula's return to power restores the conditions of the 2003–2010 period are likely to encounter unexpected friction. The article implicitly invites a recalibration of how external partners assess political risk in Brazil — not through the lens of who occupies the presidency, but through the lens of the structural balance of forces across the entire political system. This is a more demanding form of political analysis, but it is also a more accurate one.
Looking forward, the consolidation of Brazil's far-right alignment raises fundamental questions about the nature of democratic equilibrium in emerging market democracies and the role that global ideological currents play in sustaining movements that might otherwise fragment after electoral defeat. The transnational dimensions of far-right coordination — the circulation of narratives, funding networks, and organizational templates across national borders — deserve sustained scholarly attention, and Brazil's case offers both a cautionary tale and a comparative baseline. For the international development community, the challenge is to develop frameworks for engagement that do not naively conflate governmental change with structural transformation, and that take seriously the organizational depth of conservative political alignments. For Brazilian civil society, the task is to maintain institutional presence and advocacy capacity in a polarized environment where electoral outcomes shift but underlying power structures prove remarkably stable. The endurance of bolsonarismo beyond Bolsonaro is, in the final analysis, a test not only of Brazilian democracy but of the broader proposition that electoral accountability alone is sufficient to contain durable authoritarian-populist projects in the twenty-first century.