Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-08
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements has become one of the defining challenges for democratic governance in the twenty-first century. From Hungary to Italy, from the United States to India, what was once dismissed as episodic electoral volatility has revealed itself to be something more durable: the restructuring of political coalitions, institutional norms, and ideological common sense along authoritarian-nationalist lines. Brazil represents a particularly instructive case in this regard. The rise and partial electoral decline of Jair Bolsonaro did not follow the trajectory many liberal observers anticipated — namely, that defeat at the ballot box would dissolve the movement that carried him to power. A recent article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America confronts this assumption directly, analyzing the emergence and consolidation of Brazil's far-right political movement under Bolsonaro, with particular attention to the endurance of his ideological project beyond his 2022 electoral defeat. The central insight is as provocative as it is analytically significant: electoral outcomes and ideological consolidation are not the same phenomenon, and conflating them leads to a systematic misreading of how far-right movements operate and persist.
The article's central research questions concern the conditions under which Bolsonarismo cohered as a coherent political alignment and why that alignment survived its candidate's removal from office. These are not merely academic puzzles. They speak to a broader theoretical problem in comparative politics: the relationship between a political leader's personal fortunes and the structural transformation of a political field. In Brazil's case, Bolsonaro's presidency from 2019 to 2022 did not simply install a populist leader in office — it reorganized existing political tendencies, including evangelical Christian nationalism, military nostalgia, agrarian capitalist interests, and anti-PT (Workers' Party) resentment, into a coherent bloc with its own institutional infrastructure, media ecosystems, and grassroots networks. The article's contribution lies in demonstrating that this bloc did not dissolve when Bolsonaro lost to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Instead, it entered a new phase: consolidation without governmental power. This distinction — between electoral presence and ideological consolidation — is analytically crucial, and it reframes how we should assess the durability of far-right movements across the region and beyond.
Understanding the Bolsonarist alignment requires situating it within Brazil's specific political economy and its longer history of democratic fragility. Brazil's democracy, restored in 1985 after two decades of military rule, has always operated under the shadow of institutional incompleteness. The military retained significant autonomous power; economic inequality remained among the highest in the world; and the PT's dominance during the Lula and Dilma years generated a powerful backlash among segments of the middle class, agribusiness elites, and security forces who perceived redistributive politics as an existential threat to their social position. Bolsonaro did not create these tensions — he mobilized and weaponized them. His rhetoric, which combined social conservatism on gender and sexuality, aggressive pro-gun policies, climate denialism favorable to agricultural extractivism, and nostalgia for the military dictatorship, offered a coherent ideological package that spoke simultaneously to multiple constituencies with overlapping but distinct grievances. The article's analysis of how these constituencies were held together — and how they remained together after 2022 — illuminates the internal logic of the far-right alignment as something more than mere opportunism or protest voting.
The implications for ODA policy, civil society research, and democratic governance in Latin America are substantial. Donor governments and international development organizations have long operated on an assumption, inherited from modernization theory, that economic development and the expansion of a civil society sector would progressively inoculate societies against authoritarian populism. Brazil's trajectory challenges this assumption. The country's civil society sector is large and sophisticated; its democratic institutions, while stressed, remained functional enough to certify Lula's victory; and yet a movement committed to undermining those same institutions retained the loyalty of roughly half the electorate. For practitioners working in the democracy promotion and governance space, this suggests that supporting formal civil society organizations, electoral monitoring bodies, and judicial independence — while necessary — is insufficient if the underlying political economy continues to generate the material and symbolic grievances that far-right movements exploit. Strengthening democratic culture requires attending to economic inequality, media regulation, and the political integration of security sector actors in ways that current ODA frameworks rarely prioritize.
Looking forward, the consolidation of Bolsonarismo as a durable political alignment — rather than a passing electoral phenomenon — raises important questions about the medium-term trajectory of Brazilian democracy and about the regional diffusion of far-right politics more broadly. Lula's government, returned to power with a narrow mandate and governing in an intensely polarized environment, faces the challenge of managing a legislative and judicial landscape in which Bolsonarist actors retain significant institutional presence. Meanwhile, the transnational connections of Brazil's far right — with like-minded movements in the United States, Spain, and elsewhere — suggest that what happens in Brazil will not stay in Brazil. For researchers, the article's framework offers a productive model for analyzing far-right consolidation beyond electoral metrics: examining organizational infrastructure, coalition maintenance, and ideological diffusion across media and religious networks. For civil society organizations and international partners engaged in Latin America, the lesson is sobering but clarifying. The question is no longer whether the far right can be voted out of power — in some cases it can — but whether democratic societies have built the institutional depth and political coalitions necessary to prevent its return, and to govern effectively in the meantime.