Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-25
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements in the early twenty-first century has upended many of the assumptions that scholars and practitioners once held about democratic consolidation, especially in regions where transitions from authoritarian rule were relatively recent. Latin America, long regarded as a region that had successfully navigated the painful passage from military dictatorship to electoral democracy, has found itself at the center of renewed debates about the resilience of liberal norms and the institutional durability of democratic governance. Brazil, as the region's largest polity and most complex federal democracy, offers one of the most instructive and troubling case studies in this regard. The rise, apparent fall, and persistent ideological afterlife of Jair Bolsonaro's far-right movement demands careful scholarly attention not merely as a story of electoral politics, but as a structural transformation in Brazilian political culture and alignment whose consequences extend well beyond any single election cycle.
The article under examination, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, makes a significant intervention precisely by refusing to treat Bolsonaro's 2022 electoral defeat as the terminal point of the political phenomenon he represents. This is analytically important because much contemporary commentary on authoritarian populism tends to conflate electoral outcomes with ideological trajectories — treating a loss at the ballot box as evidence that a movement has been repudiated and contained. The research argues instead that Bolsonaro's ideological project has achieved a degree of consolidation in Brazilian society and within key institutional niches that renders it a durable feature of the political landscape rather than a transient episode. The distinction between electoral fortunes and structural political alignment is a conceptually rich one: it invites analysts to examine not just vote shares but the recomposition of civil society organizations, religious institutions, security sector loyalties, and subcultural identities around a coherent far-right worldview. By focusing on this deeper layer of political consolidation, the article advances our understanding of how contemporary far-right movements build staying power independent of their leaders' immediate electoral success.
To appreciate the significance of this argument, it is necessary to situate Bolsonaro's movement within the broader regional and global context of far-right resurgence. The international literature on right-wing populism — drawing on cases from Hungary, India, Turkey, and the United States — has identified a set of recurring mechanisms through which populist leaders transform political systems: the polarization of the electorate into irreconcilable moral camps, the delegitimization of independent media and judiciary, the cultivation of loyal constituencies within military and police institutions, and the weaponization of cultural and religious grievances against cosmopolitan liberal elites. Bolsonaro's Brazil replicated and in certain respects intensified all of these dynamics, drawing on a particular Brazilian historical repertoire that includes nostalgia for the 1964–1985 military dictatorship and deep evangelical Christian mobilization. What the research appears to identify is that this repertoire did not disappear when Lula da Silva narrowly prevailed in the October 2022 runoff; rather, the social and organizational infrastructure of Bolsonarismo continued to function as a coherent political community, one capable of generating the kind of January 8, 2023 institutional attack that shocked observers both inside and outside Brazil.
The policy implications of this finding are considerable, particularly for those engaged in questions of democratic governance, civil society strengthening, and development cooperation. International donors and ODA practitioners frequently operate on the assumption that electoral transitions are the primary mechanism through which political risk landscapes change, calibrating their engagement strategies around the party affiliation and declared policy priorities of sitting governments. The Brazilian case suggests that this framework is insufficient: when a far-right alignment has achieved the degree of societal consolidation described in the research, the policies and institutional relationships established during an authoritarian populist administration may prove stickier and more consequential than the formal change of government implies. For civil society organizations receiving international support in Brazil, the continued presence of a well-organized, ideologically coherent far-right bloc in congress, in state governments, in the military and federal police, and in media ecosystems represents an ongoing operational environment that cannot be analyzed away by reference to Bolsonaro's personal political fortunes. Donors designing programs in areas such as environmental governance in the Amazon, human rights monitoring, or indigenous peoples' rights must reckon with the structural reality that the Bolsonaro alignment retains significant capacity to obstruct, harass, and delegitimize civil society actors even under a Lula administration.
Looking forward, the research points toward a set of questions that will preoccupy scholars of Brazilian and Latin American politics for years to come. Will the far-right alignment continue to consolidate around Bolsonaro himself, who faces multiple criminal indictments, or will it undergo a process of routinization and succession that produces durable far-right forces organized around new leadership? Can the Brazilian left and center-left build a coalition durable enough to reverse the institutional penetration of far-right actors in the security sector and judiciary, or will the structural incentives of coalition-building in Brazil's fragmented multiparty system force perpetual accommodation? And what does the Brazilian case tell us about the conditions under which far-right movements achieve the kind of societal embedding that makes them resilient to electoral defeat — a question with direct relevance not only to Latin America but to every democracy currently navigating the global democratic recession? These are not merely academic questions; they carry urgent implications for practitioners, policymakers, and civil society leaders working to defend democratic norms in an era when the procedural survival of electoral systems no longer guarantees the substantive functioning of liberal democracy. The scholarship reviewed here makes a valuable contribution by insisting that we look beyond the scorecard of election results and attend instead to the deeper, slower-moving transformations in political alignment that will determine the character of Brazilian democracy in the decades ahead.