Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements over the past decade has fundamentally challenged longstanding assumptions about democratic consolidation, particularly in regions where transitions from authoritarian rule were once celebrated as irreversible achievements. Latin America, which spent much of the late twentieth century laboriously dismantling military dictatorships and constructing democratic institutions, now finds itself at the center of this unsettling reversal. Brazil, the region's largest democracy and most populous nation, offers perhaps the most instructive and troubling case study. The rise and persistence of Bolsonarismo — the ideological and social movement crystallized around former President Jair Bolsonaro — raises questions that extend far beyond electoral outcomes or the particular fortunes of one political figure. It forces scholars, civil society practitioners, and development analysts to grapple with what it means when illiberal politics not only gains power but survives electoral defeat and continues to reshape the political landscape of a major emerging economy.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes a crucial conceptual intervention by situating its analysis explicitly "beyond electoral fortunes." This framing is not merely rhetorical. It signals a methodological commitment to understanding Bolsonarismo as a durable political alignment rather than an ephemeral electoral coalition assembled around a charismatic outsider. Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in one of the most consequential democratic contests in recent Latin American history, yet the movement he catalyzed did not dissipate. It retained substantial legislative representation, continued mobilizing a committed social base, and remained capable of generating political disruption — most visibly in the January 8, 2023 attacks on Brazil's presidential palace, congress, and supreme court, events that drew immediate comparisons to the January 6, 2021 events at the United States Capitol. The analytical task the article undertakes is therefore to explain not how Bolsonaro won, but how his ideological project consolidated itself as a lasting feature of Brazilian political life, with or without him at its center.
To understand this consolidation, it is necessary to appreciate the structural and cultural preconditions that the Brazilian far right skillfully exploited. Brazil's political economy has long been characterized by deep inequality, persistent institutional distrust, and a civic culture in which formal democratic participation coexists uneasily with widespread disillusionment. The years following the 2013 mass protests saw an accelerating erosion of confidence in traditional parties, compounded by the Car Wash corruption investigations that decimated the Workers' Party's credibility and drew the entire political class into disrepute. Into this vacuum, Bolsonaro's movement offered a coherent — if factually tenuous — narrative of moral and national restoration, drawing on evangelical Christian networks, military nostalgia, agrarian business interests, and a digitally native base of young men radicalized through social media ecosystems. The article's contribution lies in tracing how these heterogeneous constituencies were not merely mobilized around a single candidate but were woven into a durable alignment with shared grievances, shared media environments, and shared enemies. This distinction between electoral coalition and political alignment is analytically significant: coalitions dissolve when candidates lose; alignments restructure the field of political contestation for years or decades.
The implications for civil society, governance, and ODA frameworks in Latin America are substantial. Development institutions and international donors have often constructed their engagement with Brazil around assumptions of institutional stability, a functioning legal system capable of protecting civil society organizations, and a democratic government broadly receptive to international norms on human rights, environmental protection, and indigenous rights. The Bolsonaro years systematically challenged each of these assumptions, defunding civil society organizations, weakening environmental enforcement agencies, and adopting openly confrontational postures toward international donors and multilateral institutions. Even after Bolsonaro's departure from office, the article's findings suggest that the political forces animating these tendencies remain structurally embedded. Civil society organizations working in Brazil must now operate in a context where a significant and organized political force views them as ideological adversaries, not partners in development. For ODA practitioners, this raises difficult questions about how to sustain programmatic continuity, protect local partners, and maintain long-term institutional investments in a polarized political environment where the balance of power may shift again.
From a comparative and theoretical perspective, the Brazilian case illuminates a broader pattern visible across multiple democratic contexts: the capacity of far-right movements to use democratic institutions instrumentally while simultaneously eroding the norms that give those institutions meaning. The literature on democratic backsliding, associated with scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, has emphasized how contemporary authoritarianism tends to operate through legal mechanisms rather than coups, making it harder to identify and resist. Bolsonarismo fits this typology while also displaying distinctively Brazilian features — the particular role of evangelical Protestant networks as organizational infrastructure, the reliance on WhatsApp ecosystems that were harder to monitor and regulate than open social media platforms, and the strategic cultivation of military ambiguity that kept armed forces institutions from clearly committing to democratic defense. Comparative analysis of these features against analogous cases in Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States enriches our theoretical understanding of far-right consolidation as a global phenomenon driven by structural conditions rather than exceptional national pathologies.
Looking forward, the persistence of a consolidated far-right alignment in Brazil presents both an intellectual and a practical challenge. Intellectually, political scientists and area specialists must resist the temptation to reduce Bolsonarismo to the biography of its namesake. The article's framing wisely insists that the movement's durability is the primary analytical object. This means that future research should attend to the organizational infrastructure of the Brazilian far right — its church networks, its parliamentary caucuses, its digital media ecosystem, and its connections to agrarian and security sector interests — as subjects worthy of sustained empirical investigation independent of electoral cycles. Practically, the Lula government's capacity to consolidate a democratic restoration will depend not only on its legislative and policy performance but on whether it can address the underlying socioeconomic grievances and institutional distrust that Bolsonarismo exploited. International partners in development, civil society support, and regional diplomacy will need to engage with this complexity honestly, recognizing that Brazil's democratic trajectory remains genuinely contested. The trajectory of the world's fourth-largest democracy matters enormously not only for its 215 million citizens but for the broader credibility of democratic governance as a model in an era of intense ideological competition. The analytical work of understanding how far-right alignments consolidate is, in this sense, not a narrowly academic exercise but a contribution to one of the most consequential political questions of the present moment.