Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the democratic world has prompted serious scholarly inquiry into a question that goes beyond simple electoral arithmetic: under what conditions does a populist-authoritarian movement outlast its founding political moment, and what does its persistence mean for democratic institutions, civil society, and the international order? Brazil offers one of the most consequential and analytically rich cases through which to examine this question. The rise, tenure, and post-electoral survival of Jair Bolsonaro's political project is not merely a story about one man's defeat in a contested election — it is a story about the structural transformation of a major emerging democracy, with ramifications that extend well beyond the country's borders. For development scholars, ODA practitioners, and civil society researchers, understanding the durability of Brazil's far-right alignment is essential not only for regional analysis but for understanding the broader global ecology of democratic backsliding in which international cooperation and civil society space are increasingly contested.
The central contribution of the article under review lies in its analytical pivot away from the electoral moment as the definitive test of a political movement's significance. Much of the global commentary on Bolsonaro focused on his 2022 loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as a vindication of Brazilian democratic resilience, and on the January 8, 2023 Capitol-style insurrection that followed as a dramatic but ultimately contained episode. The authors of this study resist that comfortable conclusion. Instead, they argue that Bolsonaro's defeat did not dismantle the ideological infrastructure he constructed over years in power — rather, it revealed how deeply embedded that project had become in Brazilian political institutions, civil-military relations, evangelical networks, and social media ecosystems. The study distinguishes carefully between electoral fortune and ideological consolidation, treating them as analytically separable phenomena. A movement can lose an election while winning a longer-term battle to reshape the terrain on which future political contests will be fought. This distinction is analytically powerful and has direct implications for how researchers and policymakers assess democratic recovery following periods of populist-authoritarian governance.
The consolidation of the Bolsonaro alignment is situated within structural conditions that the article treats as both enabling and sustaining. Brazil's political economy has long been characterized by high inequality, institutional fragmentation, and a party system prone to fragmentation and clientelism — conditions that historically made it fertile ground for anti-establishment appeals. Bolsonaro's movement exploited these conditions while simultaneously reshaping them, constructing what can be described as a cross-class alliance anchored in conservative evangelical Christianity, agribusiness capital, and a militaristic nationalism that appealed to segments of the security and armed forces communities. The article's attention to the religious dimension is particularly important: evangelical Protestantism has become one of the most significant forces in Brazilian civil society over the past two decades, and Bolsonaro's ability to embed his project within that network created a durable organizational substrate that survived electoral reversal. For civil society scholars, this is a critical insight — it challenges linear narratives in which civil society functions straightforwardly as a counterweight to authoritarian tendencies, revealing instead that organized civil society can be a vector for illiberal consolidation depending on which segments of it are politically mobilized and by whom.
The regional and global dimensions of the Bolsonaro phenomenon cannot be understood in isolation from the transnational networks in which Brazil's far-right became embedded. The article's findings connect to a broader pattern visible across Latin America and beyond, wherein national far-right movements have increasingly operated as nodes within international ideological networks, sharing tactics, rhetoric, and organizational models in ways that amplify their reach and resilience. In Latin America specifically, the political landscape of the 2010s and early 2020s saw a wave of center-right and far-right electoral victories — in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina under Macri, and Colombia — that were often interpreted as independent national responses to perceived failures of the Pink Tide governments. Viewed through the lens of this study, however, such movements appear less as isolated national phenomena than as manifestations of a shared far-right political project with transnational coherence. This has direct implications for ODA and development policy: the consolidation of far-right political alignments tends to be accompanied by hostility toward multilateralism, shrinking space for civil society organizations, rollback of environmental and indigenous protections, and reorientation of development priorities toward agro-extractivist growth models that frequently conflict with the sustainable development objectives that underpin much contemporary ODA programming.
The policy and research implications of the study are substantial. For international development practitioners and donors operating in Brazil and in comparable political environments, the key lesson is that democratic backsliding cannot be assessed solely through electoral outcomes. The consolidation of illiberal alignments occurs through institutional capture, normative transformation, and the reconfiguration of civil society — processes that can continue or even accelerate after a movement's standard-bearer loses an election. ODA frameworks that rely primarily on formal democratic indicators — elections held, transitions completed, constitutional order maintained — will systematically underestimate the depth of democratic erosion and the risks facing civil society partners on the ground. A more sophisticated analytical approach would integrate attention to the organizational infrastructure of political movements, the ideological reshaping of state institutions, and the closing of civic space for critical voices, all of which may persist or worsen even under nominally democratic successor governments facing strong opposition from a consolidated far-right bloc.
Looking forward, the trajectory of Brazil's political landscape under Lula's third administration will be shaped not only by the government's policy choices but by the structural durability of the Bolsonaro alignment as an opposition force. For researchers, this case will serve as a crucial test of theories about democratic resilience and institutional recovery, raising questions about how quickly — and whether — norms and institutions degraded during periods of populist-authoritarian governance can be rebuilt. For civil society organizations and their international partners, the immediate challenge is navigating a political environment in which a substantial portion of the population remains mobilized around an ideological project that remains hostile to pluralism, environmental regulation, and international cooperation norms. The article reviewed here makes a valuable contribution by insisting that we take that consolidation seriously on its own terms rather than dissolving it into the optimistic narrative of democratic restoration. The durability of far-right political alignments beyond their electoral peaks is one of the defining political challenges of the current era, and Brazil will remain one of the most important laboratories through which scholars, practitioners, and policymakers work to understand it.