Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-14
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements over the past decade has forced scholars of comparative politics and international development to revisit foundational assumptions about democratic consolidation, liberal order, and the durability of electoral accountability. Nowhere has this challenge been more acute than in Latin America, a region that endured authoritarian rule throughout much of the twentieth century before painstakingly constructing fragile democratic institutions during the 1980s and 1990s. Brazil, the region's largest democracy by population and economic weight, became the focal point of this contest when Jair Bolsonaro's presidency from 2019 to 2022 demonstrated that populist far-right projects were not merely transient expressions of voter discontent but potentially durable ideological formations. A recent study published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America takes this observation seriously, asking not just how Bolsonaro came to power but whether his political project has outlasted his electoral fortunes — and the answer it offers carries significant implications for how researchers, policymakers, and civil society actors understand democratic resilience in the Global South.
The article's central analytical move is to decouple electoral outcomes from ideological consolidation. Too often, comparative political science treats electoral defeat as equivalent to political defeat, measuring the health of democratic institutions by whether autocratic incumbents lose and leave office. The 2022 Brazilian presidential election, in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated Bolsonaro by a narrow margin of approximately 1.8 percentage points, might on this logic be read as a straightforward democratic correction. The study pushes back against this reading by demonstrating that Bolsonaro's defeat at the ballot box did not dismantle the ideological infrastructure his movement had been constructing throughout his presidency. The far-right alignment — encompassing evangelical networks, agrarian business elites, security sector constituencies, and a large segment of the lower-middle class — survived the electoral verdict and continued to exert structural pressure on Brazilian political life. This finding is analytically important because it shifts the locus of concern from the presidency to the broader ecosystem within which executive power operates. Democratic consolidation, the article implies, requires more than removing an autocratic leader from office; it demands the weakening of the coalitional and cultural networks that sustained that leader's project.
Understanding the social base of Bolsonarismo requires situating it within Brazil's long-standing inequalities of race, class, and geography, as well as within the specific crisis of the PT (Workers' Party) model that preceded it. The Lula and Dilma Rousseff governments of 2003 to 2016 produced genuine social gains — millions of Brazilians were lifted out of poverty through Bolsa Família and expanded access to higher education — but they also generated a political backlash among constituencies who felt culturally displaced, economically threatened, or morally affronted by the PT's association with corruption scandals and identity-based social policies. Bolsonaro's genius, if it can be called that, was to fuse a traditional military-nationalist conservative ideology with the grievance politics of social media, creating a movement that felt simultaneously anti-establishment and deeply authoritarian. This synthesis drew from global playbooks — the Trump coalition in the United States, the Orbán model in Hungary, the Fratelli d'Italia's normalization strategy — while remaining distinctly Brazilian in its invocation of 1964 military nostalgia and its instrumentalization of Pentecostal religious identity. Placing Brazil within this comparative frame reminds analysts that the country is neither an anomaly nor merely an imitator; it is an active participant in a transnational ideological current that is reshaping democratic politics across multiple continents.
For international development researchers and ODA practitioners, the persistence of far-right alignments in major middle-income countries raises concrete and uncomfortable questions about the conditions under which aid and civil society support actually work. The Bolsonaro years were characterized by systematic attacks on environmental governance, Indigenous rights protections, and the NGO sector — attacks that exposed the vulnerability of internationally supported civil society organizations to executive hostility. Where democratic institutions were strong enough, or where civil society was sufficiently entrenched, these attacks were partially absorbed. Where institutions were weaker, the damage was lasting. Development agencies and bilateral donors who had invested heavily in governance reform, social participation mechanisms, and environmental accountability found that their programmatic achievements could be rapidly eroded when the political context shifted. The article's argument about ideological consolidation thus has a practical corollary: it is insufficient to build civil society capacity or strengthen formal institutions in isolation from the political economy of the coalitions that govern and oppose. Programs that ignore the organizational infrastructure of anti-democratic movements — their financing, their media ecosystems, their links to state security apparatus — will remain structurally exposed.
Looking forward, the Brazilian case offers a stress test for theories of democratic resilience that will become increasingly relevant as far-right movements consolidate legislative and subnational power across the Americas and Europe. The Lula government's challenge is not simply to govern effectively but to govern in a manner that visibly undermines the social contract Bolsonarismo offered — a contract built on nationalism, cultural conservatism, and anti-institutionalism — without triggering the backlash dynamics that historically strengthen populist oppositions. This is an extraordinarily difficult political equilibrium to sustain, particularly given Brazil's fragmented party system, its constitutionally entrenched congressional power, and the genuine depth of ideological commitment among Bolsonaro's core supporters. For researchers working in the tradition of civil society and development studies, the implication is that the field must develop more sophisticated frameworks for understanding how illiberal movements translate cultural and religious identities into durable political coalitions. Electoral studies alone cannot capture this dynamic; what is needed is sustained attention to the organizational, financial, and symbolic infrastructure that allows far-right projects to persist beyond the tenure of any individual leader. Brazil in 2026 and beyond will be a critical site for testing whether democratic politics can reconstitute itself not merely through institutional resilience but through the harder work of building alternative coalitional imaginaries capable of winning the hearts, not just the votes, of citizens navigating deep uncertainty about their economic futures and cultural identities.