Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-09
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the democratic world has become one of the defining phenomena of early twenty-first century politics. From Europe to the Americas, scholars and practitioners have grappled with the question of whether these movements represent temporary electoral disruptions or more durable realignments of political culture. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offered one of the most vivid and consequential cases in the Global South, and its aftermath — the persistence of a muscular ideological project even after electoral defeat — raises fundamental questions about the nature of democratic resilience, the durability of populist coalitions, and the limits of electoral politics as a corrective mechanism. Understanding what happened in Brazil is not merely a matter of regional interest; it is essential for anyone seeking to comprehend the structural forces reshaping liberal democracy globally, and for development scholars and practitioners whose work unfolds within political environments increasingly shaped by anti-pluralist forces.
The article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses a question that sits at the heart of contemporary political science: why do far-right movements persist and even consolidate after their standard-bearers lose elections? The case of Bolsonaro is analytically rich precisely because the conventional wisdom would have anticipated his 2022 defeat to Lula da Silva as a turning point — a democratic correction after four years of authoritarian populism. Yet the evidence suggests something more troubling: that the Bolsonarista project did not simply survive its electoral setback but actually deepened its organizational and ideological roots during and after the campaign cycle. The article's two guiding research questions — how the far-right alignment emerged and how it endured beyond the vote — point toward an understanding of political mobilization that goes well beyond candidate-centered analysis. Bolsonaro was never merely a politician; he was the crystallizing figure for a preexisting social bloc composed of evangelical Christians, agrarian capitalists, military-affiliated networks, and a broad stratum of the urban lower-middle class that had grown deeply alienated from the Workers' Party establishment. The movement's durability, then, is best understood not through the lens of electoral fortune but through the sociology of a consolidated political identity.
This finding resonates strongly with comparative literature on right-wing populism in other contexts. Scholars of the Trump movement in the United States, of Orbánism in Hungary, and of the Italian far right under the post-fascist tradition have similarly documented the way in which electoral losses do not dissolve populist coalitions but may actually radicalize them, transforming a governing project into a movement of permanent opposition and grievance. In the Brazilian case, the January 8, 2023 insurrection — in which Bolsonarista mobs stormed the presidential palace, the Congress, and the Supreme Court — represented precisely this dynamic: the transformation of electoral disappointment into a legitimacy-denying insurgency. For Latin Americanists, this trajectory has uncomfortable echoes of earlier cycles in which military institutions, conservative elites, and mass mobilization combined to destabilize democratic governments, albeit in forms adapted to the contemporary media and organizational landscape. The role of social media platforms, WhatsApp networks, and evangelical pulpits in sustaining the Bolsonarista epistemic community after the election is a crucial dimension of the story, one that illustrates how digital infrastructure has altered the economics of political mobilization in ways that disadvantage institutional gatekeepers and empower decentralized networks of ideological commitment.
From a development and ODA perspective, the consolidation of a far-right alignment in Brazil carries significant policy implications. Brazil under Bolsonaro dramatically reduced funding for environmental protection, weakened indigenous land rights, accelerated deforestation in the Amazon, and withdrew from international cooperative frameworks on climate and human rights. These shifts were not incidental to the far-right project but central to it: the Bolsonarista coalition was explicitly organized around the interests of agribusiness, extractive industries, and a social conservatism hostile to the rights-based frameworks that have informed much of the international development agenda since the 1990s. Even under Lula's restored presidency, the structural power of the congressional caucus known as the bancada ruralista — the agrarian bloc that formed a central pillar of the Bolsonarista alignment — continues to constrain environmental and social policy. International partners and civil society organizations working on sustainable development, forest governance, or gender rights in Brazil must reckon with this entrenched political reality. The lesson for ODA practitioners is that political economy analysis cannot be confined to the executive branch or to formal electoral outcomes; it must attend to the durable coalitions and ideological commitments that shape the policy environment regardless of who occupies the presidency.
Looking forward, the Brazilian case invites researchers and practitioners to rethink the frameworks through which they assess democratic backsliding and recovery. The transition from Bolsonaro to Lula is not a clean restoration of the pre-2018 status quo; it is rather a contested equilibrium in which a re-energized left-of-center government confronts a far-right movement that retains significant institutional presence in Congress, in state governments, and in the military apparatus. For scholars of civil society, this raises important questions about the conditions under which civic organizations, trade unions, social movements, and religious institutions can serve as bulwarks of democratic pluralism against authoritarian pressure — and the conditions under which they become vectors of that pressure, as evangelical networks largely did under Bolsonaro. For development researchers, it underscores the importance of attending to the political sociology of the communities in which development interventions are embedded, rather than treating the political environment as a background variable. The consolidation of far-right alignments is not a pathology confined to wealthy democracies in the Global North; it is a global phenomenon with distinct but deeply consequential expressions in the developing world, and Brazil's trajectory will remain an indispensable reference point for understanding its dynamics in the years ahead.