Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across Western democracies in the early twenty-first century has prompted serious scholarly attention to questions of ideological durability, social coalition-building, and the limits of electoral accountability as a mechanism for political correction. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offered one of the most striking and consequential examples of this phenomenon in the Global South, presenting analysts and policymakers alike with a case that defied many assumptions about how populist authoritarian projects rise, sustain themselves, and ultimately either collapse or persist beyond their most visible figureheads. The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, "Beyond Electoral Fortunes: The Consolidation of a Far-Right Alignment in Brazil," intervenes in this debate with a contribution that is timely not only for Brazilian studies but for the broader comparative literature on democratic backsliding and the organizational life of far-right political movements worldwide.
The central intellectual contribution of the study lies in its insistence that the fate of Bolsonarismo cannot be adequately understood through the narrow lens of electoral outcomes alone. The 2022 presidential election, in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party narrowly defeated Bolsonaro after a deeply polarized campaign, might superficially be read as a democratic corrective — the electorate rejecting an incumbent whose tenure was marked by institutional confrontation, the erosion of environmental governance, aggressive mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, and systematic attacks on Brazil's independent press and judiciary. Yet the article argues that treating Bolsonaro's electoral defeat as a terminus for his political project would be analytically mistaken and empirically inadequate. The more consequential question the authors raise is whether Bolsonarismo has by now achieved a degree of institutional and social consolidation that makes it a durable feature of Brazilian political life regardless of any single electoral cycle. This framing reorients the analysis away from the political fortunes of an individual leader and toward the structural conditions that make far-right ideological projects sticky even when the candidate who initially crystallized them loses power.
To address this, the article focuses on the organizational and coalitional architecture that Bolsonaro helped assemble during and after his presidency. This includes an examination of how Bolsonaro cultivated deep networks within the military and security apparatus, evangelical religious communities, agribusiness sectors, and online information ecosystems that proved remarkably resistant to the normative and institutional pressures that followed his electoral defeat. The article's analysis of ideological consolidation is particularly instructive: rather than presenting Bolsonarismo simply as a cult of personality or a temporary response to the failures of the PT governments, it traces the movement's ideological coherence across anti-communism, social conservatism, economic libertarianism, and Christian nationalism as a configuration that speaks to genuine and longstanding tensions within Brazilian society. In this respect, the work joins a growing body of comparative literature suggesting that far-right movements in hybrid democratic contexts do not merely exploit grievances but actively produce and reproduce the political identities of their constituencies. The movement's persistence through the attempted insurrection of January 8, 2023 — when Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in Brasília in scenes deliberately echoing the United States Capitol attack — demonstrated that the social and organizational base of the movement retained both the will and the capacity for collective action even after formal political power had been ceded.
The implications of this analysis extend well beyond Brazil's borders and carry significant weight for scholars and practitioners working on ODA effectiveness, civil society resilience, and democratic governance in the Global South. Development assistance frameworks have traditionally been premised, at least partly, on assumptions about democratic consolidation in recipient countries — that investments in institutions, civil society organizations, and rule-of-law infrastructure gradually produce conditions inhospitable to authoritarian or far-right reversals. Brazil under Bolsonaro, and more broadly the trajectory of countries like Hungary, India, and the Philippines, suggests the inadequacy of linear democratization narratives. When state capacity is weaponized against civil society, when digital information environments are deliberately polluted, and when religious and cultural identities are mobilized to delegitimize pluralist institutions, standard ODA frameworks centered on capacity-building and institutional strengthening can find themselves supporting structures that are themselves under systematic attack. The article implicitly invites the ODA and international development community to consider more carefully the political economy of the contexts into which assistance flows, and to develop more robust analytical tools for distinguishing between governance environments that are deteriorating, those that are stable but authoritarian, and those where democratic resilience is genuinely being built from below.
Looking forward, the study opens important questions for both researchers and practitioners. For scholars of comparative politics, the Brazilian case suggests that the study of far-right consolidation must be pursued at the level of social movement infrastructure, religious networks, digital communication architectures, and intra-institutional alliances — not merely at the level of parties and elections. The movement's organizational endurance even as its founder faces criminal prosecution, electoral disqualification, and diminished formal power is precisely what makes Bolsonarismo theoretically instructive as a paradigm case. For civil society practitioners and development actors, the lesson is perhaps more urgent: the conditions that allow far-right alignment to consolidate — weakened intermediary institutions, profound economic inequality, epistemological fragmentation through social media, and the capture of key state security functions — are not unique to Brazil. They are present in various configurations across Latin America and the wider developing world, and addressing them requires proactive investment in the structural foundations of democratic life rather than reactive responses to individual political crises. The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America thus deserves a wide readership not as a study of one country's peculiar political pathology, but as a contribution to the most consequential analytical challenges facing democratic governance in the current global moment.