Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-06-26
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 reshaped how scholars and development practitioners understand democratic consolidation, civil society resilience, and the geopolitics of international cooperation. Nowhere has this phenomenon been more dramatic, or more consequential for the Latin American region, than in Brazil. The publication of this article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America arrives at a pivotal moment: nearly three years after Jair Bolsonaro's narrow electoral defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022, Brazilian democracy continues to grapple with the structural aftershocks of a political project that proved far more durable than its electoral outcome suggested. For researchers at the intersection of democratic governance, civil society, and development policy, understanding why far-right political alignments persist beyond the ballot box is not merely an academic exercise — it is essential to designing effective strategies for protecting pluralist institutions, safeguarding civil society space, and maintaining the integrity of aid relationships in polarized environments.
The article's central contribution lies in its analytical shift away from electoral-centric explanations of far-right politics. By asking not only how Bolsonarismo came to power but also why its ideological project endured after electoral defeat, the authors challenge a common assumption embedded in liberal democratic theory: that losing elections is tantamount to losing relevance. The Brazilian case dismantles this assumption with considerable force. Bolsonaro's movement did not disintegrate after 2022. Instead, it demonstrated a capacity for institutional entrenchment, social network consolidation, and ideological reproduction that had been carefully cultivated across years of governance. The movement embedded itself within the military, agribusiness networks, evangelical churches, and municipal-level political structures in ways that electoral tallies alone cannot capture or undo. What the article appears to term a "far-right alignment" suggests something more than a political party or a charismatic leader — it denotes a multi-sectoral coalition with self-sustaining logics of reproduction. This is a qualitative distinction of enormous importance for understanding how democratic backsliding works in practice.
The Brazilian trajectory fits within a broader regional and global pattern that scholars of Latin American politics have been tracking with increasing urgency. From Hungary's Orbán to India's Hindutva movement, far-right political projects have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to rewire state institutions, capture regulatory agencies, and hollow out civil society protections — even under formally democratic conditions. In Latin America, Bolivia's transitional period between 2019 and 2020, El Salvador under Nayib Bukele, and Argentina's current experiment under Javier Milei all illustrate variations on a theme: the consolidation of political alignments that use democratic procedures instrumentally while systematically weakening the horizontal accountability mechanisms that give democracy its substance. Brazil's case is instructive because of its sheer scale — as the region's largest democracy and economy, the patterns of mobilization and institutional capture that emerged under Bolsonaro have set templates that smaller movements across the hemisphere have studied and adapted. The article's findings thus carry a regional significance that extends well beyond Brazil's borders.
For practitioners working in ODA, civil society support, and democratic governance programming, these findings carry direct policy relevance. The durability of Bolsonarismo as an ideological alignment rather than merely an electoral bloc has profound implications for how international donors and civil society organizations calibrate their engagement strategies. During the Bolsonaro years, Brazil witnessed significant constriction of civic space — restrictions on NGO operations, hostility toward environmental and indigenous rights organizations, and a sharp deterioration in the government's relationship with multilateral human rights bodies. The partial reversal of these conditions under the Lula government has not been uniformly distributed, and in many municipalities and states where Bolsonarist political networks remain dominant, civil society organizations continue to operate under significant constraint. Donors and international partners must therefore resist the temptation to treat electoral transitions as synonymous with enabling environments for civil society. Subnational political dynamics, embedded institutional loyalties, and the social-cultural infrastructure of far-right alignment all require sustained, granular analysis — precisely the kind that this article models.
Looking forward, the consolidation of Brazil's far-right alignment raises enduring questions about democratic resilience, the role of civil society in contesting authoritarian drift, and the nature of political learning within social movements. The events of January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed the Presidential Palace, National Congress, and Supreme Court in Brasília — a sequence unmistakably echoing the events in Washington on January 6, 2021 — demonstrated that electoral defeat had not extinguished the movement's capacity for mobilization or its willingness to challenge institutional legitimacy. Yet the Brazilian state's subsequent judicial response, including the prosecution of hundreds of participants and the ongoing legal proceedings against Bolsonaro himself, has opened a comparative laboratory for scholars studying how democratic systems mount institutional self-defense. Whether these accountability mechanisms will prove sufficient to arrest the consolidation of the far-right alignment, or whether they will paradoxically intensify it by creating a narrative of political persecution, remains one of the central empirical questions facing researchers in the coming years. For IOCSS and allied institutions, this article is a valuable contribution to a growing literature on the non-linear, post-electoral life of authoritarian populism — and a reminder that democratic consolidation is never simply a function of who wins the election.