Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements over the past decade has posed fundamental challenges to liberal democratic theory, electoral research, and international development frameworks alike. From Hungary and Italy to India and the United States, analysts have grappled with a persistent question: why do authoritarian-populist ideological projects outlast their electoral vehicles? In Latin America, this question reaches particular urgency in the context of Brazil, a country whose democratic trajectory has long served as a bellwether for the broader region. The political career of Jair Bolsonaro — who governed as president from 2019 to 2022, lost a closely contested election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October of that year, and whose movement nonetheless remains a dominant force in Brazilian political life — provides one of the most analytically rich case studies of contemporary far-right consolidation anywhere in the world. A new study published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America takes up this challenge directly, examining not merely the electoral dimensions of Bolsonarismo but its deeper institutional and social entrenchment, arguing that the movement's endurance is better explained by structural alignment than by the contingencies of any single electoral cycle.
The central contribution of this article lies in its analytical reframing. Most scholarship on Bolsonaro has concentrated on the conditions that enabled his 2018 electoral victory — the systemic corruption scandals associated with Operação Lava Jato, the imprisonment of Lula as a candidate, the fragmentation of the Brazilian party system, and the structural grievances generated by a severe economic recession. These factors remain important, but they risk reducing Bolsonarismo to an epiphenomenon of crisis, something that emerges from dysfunction and recedes when conditions normalize. The Journal of Politics in Latin America article challenges this reading by asking a different question: what explains the persistence of the far-right alignment in Brazil even after the defeat of its leading figure? The authors find that Bolsonaro's project succeeded in constructing durable coalitional infrastructure — binding together evangelical Christian networks, agribusiness interests, security and military constituencies, and segments of the urban lower-middle class — that cannot be dissolved simply by an electoral reversal. This is not merely a base of voters; it is an organized social bloc with shared identities, institutional presence, and the capacity to reproduce itself politically across electoral cycles.
This finding resonates powerfully with broader patterns observed across the Global South and beyond. Comparative political sociology has increasingly demonstrated that successful populist movements of both left and right tend to generate what scholars call "movement parties" — political organizations that blur the distinction between formal electoral machinery and informal social mobilization. Bolsonaro's movement exhibits these characteristics with particular intensity, having cultivated a media ecosystem of WhatsApp groups, YouTube channels, and alternative news platforms that sustain ideological community independent of official party structures. The analysis in this article also engages with the phenomenon of institutional capture: Bolsonaro's years in government were used not only to implement policy but to seed loyalists throughout the security apparatus, the judiciary, and state-owned enterprises, creating nodes of resistance to the subsequent Lula administration. For scholars of civil society and democratic consolidation, this raises deeply uncomfortable questions about the reversibility of illiberal consolidation and the limits of electoral democracy as a corrective mechanism. What happens when a movement that campaigns against institutions simultaneously colonizes them?
From a development and ODA policy perspective, the stakes of this analysis extend well beyond Brazil's borders. Brazil is a major recipient of climate finance, a pivotal actor in Amazonian conservation frameworks, and a participant in multilateral development governance through the BRICS grouping and various UN agencies. The persistence of the far-right alignment — with its skepticism toward multilateral commitments, its contempt for indigenous land rights, its hostility to gender and reproductive health programming — creates lasting structural headwinds for development cooperation even under a nominally progressive government. Lula's return to power restored Brazil to international climate agreements and reinvigorated diplomatic engagement with the Global South, but the domestic political environment constrains the pace and ambition of reform. Legislative majorities aligned with the Bolsonarist bloc continue to shape budget allocations, land policy, and social protection frameworks. For bilateral and multilateral donors, this means that project design must account for political fragility in ways that go beyond standard governance risk assessments — the challenge is not state weakness in the conventional sense, but organized ideological contestation of the state's developmental direction.
Looking forward, the study's implications for both researchers and practitioners are considerable. For scholars of Latin American politics, the Brazilian case suggests the need to move beyond electoral outcome as the primary dependent variable in studies of democratic resilience. The consolidation of far-right alignment in Brazil is a process that predates 2018, survived 2022, and is likely to shape the country's political landscape well into the 2030s regardless of what happens in the next presidential cycle. For civil society organizations and international development partners operating in Brazil, the analysis underscores the importance of understanding the social and institutional geography of the Bolsonarist bloc — not as an undifferentiated mass but as a coalition with internal tensions, competing interests, and potential fracture points. Engagement strategies that treat Brazilian civil society as a homogeneous partner for progressive reform risk misreading the terrain entirely. The consolidation of far-right alignment in Brazil is, in this sense, not a story about one man or one election — it is a story about the structural transformation of political identity in a major emerging democracy, with lessons that extend across the hemisphere and across the disciplinary boundaries that too often separate electoral analysis from development research.