Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-24
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The rise of far-right political movements across the globe over the past decade has posed fundamental challenges to democratic institutions, civil society organizations, and international development frameworks. In Latin America, no case has attracted more sustained scholarly and policy attention than Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, whose presidency from 2019 to 2022 represented not merely an electoral episode but a structural transformation of the country's political landscape. The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, authored ahead of print, confronts a question that many observers were too quick to close after October 2022: does an electoral defeat translate into the defeat of an ideological project? The answer, this analysis suggests, is emphatically no — and understanding why carries profound implications for how researchers, development practitioners, and civil society actors interpret political risk in the hemisphere's largest democracy.
The central analytical contribution of the article lies in its conceptual distinction between electoral fortunes and political consolidation. Much of the commentary following Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's narrow victory over Bolsonaro in the second round of Brazil's 2022 presidential election treated the result as a democratic restoration, a return to the pre-Bolsonaro political equilibrium. The article challenges this narrative by examining the organizational, sociological, and ideological infrastructure that Bolsonarismo erected during its time in power — infrastructure that outlasted the presidency itself. Bolsonaro's movement cultivated dense networks within the military officer corps, evangelical churches, agribusiness associations, and digital media ecosystems, each of which continues to function as a vehicle for far-right mobilization. The January 8, 2023 attacks on the Brazilian Congress, Supreme Court, and Presidential Palace, just one week after Lula's inauguration, served as a vivid illustration of this endurance: a movement capable of organizing mass insurrection does not disappear simply because it lost an election.
From a political economy standpoint, Bolsonarismo's staying power must be understood against the backdrop of Brazil's structural contradictions. The Brazilian state has historically oscillated between developmentalist ambition and fiscal austerity, between democratic inclusion and authoritarian temptation. The Bolsonaro presidency exploited a specific conjuncture: the exhaustion of the PT's (Workers' Party) redistributive model following the Lava Jato corruption investigations, combined with persistent informality in labor markets, evangelical Christianity's dramatic growth among lower-income urban communities, and deep distrust of legacy political institutions. Far-right alignment in this context was not reducible to Bolsonaro's personal charisma — it was articulated through genuine grievances about crime, economic precarity, and cultural anxiety, grievances that remain entirely unresolved under Lula's third administration. The article's framing of consolidation rather than merely emergence is therefore analytically significant: it suggests that the conditions producing far-right alignment are more durable than the political figure who first channeled them.
The implications for ODA architecture and civil society programming in Brazil deserve serious attention from development practitioners. The Bolsonaro years saw systematic attacks on Brazil's dense network of civil society organizations, particularly those engaged in environmental governance, indigenous rights, gender equality, and urban poverty reduction. International donors witnessed the defunding and delegitimization of organizations they had co-financed for decades, sometimes through legal pressure, sometimes through violent rhetoric that exposed activists to physical danger. While the Lula government has moved to reinstate many of these programs, the civil society sector remains fragile: many organizations lost institutional memory, staff, and local trust during the intervening years. Development agencies operating in Brazil must now reckon with a political environment in which any program associated with the federal government or international institutions risks being weaponized by far-right actors as evidence of foreign interference or ideological subversion. Building resilience into civil society programming — through diversified funding, legal protection mechanisms, and stronger horizontal networks among organizations — is no longer a procedural nicety but a strategic necessity.
The comparative dimension of Brazil's experience resonates far beyond its borders. Across Latin America, far-right movements with Bolsonarist characteristics — anti-institutionalism, evangelical social conservatism, military nostalgia, and aggressive deployment of social media — have gained traction in countries including Argentina under Javier Milei, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Paraguay. The article's framework for analyzing consolidation rather than mere electoral performance provides a valuable template for researchers studying these cases. If far-right alignment becomes the default political identity for significant segments of the region's population — particularly among younger men in precarious employment, Pentecostal communities, and security-sector constituencies — then the post-Pink Tide hope for a stable, democratic left-center hegemony in Latin America must be reassessed. Political scientists, sociologists, and development researchers would do well to invest in longitudinal studies of the social bases of these movements, rather than treating each election as a definitive verdict.
Looking forward, the consolidation of far-right alignment in Brazil raises questions that practitioners and researchers must hold together rather than separate. Can democratic institutions be strengthened from within while a significant minority of the electorate views those institutions as illegitimate? Can ODA-financed civil society programs operate effectively when the political environment frames international engagement as a threat to national sovereignty? Can the moderate left govern a deeply polarized society without either capitulating to authoritarian pressures or provoking the backlash it fears? The article under review does not resolve these questions — nor should it — but its insistence on taking the far-right's organizational durability seriously is itself a contribution of the first order. The field of Latin American political studies, and the international development community that relies on its analyses, will benefit from more work in this vein: rigorous, empirically grounded, and resistant to the reassuring fiction that democratic elections automatically close the chapters they appear to conclude.