Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the globe has fundamentally reshaped assumptions about the durability of liberal democratic norms and the predictability of electoral outcomes. Brazil's experience under Jair Bolsonaro offers one of the most analytically rich case studies in this regard — not because it produced a straightforward authoritarian outcome, but precisely because it did not. Bolsonaro lost the 2022 presidential election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of the Workers' Party (PT), yet the political movement he built and the ideological alignment he consolidated did not dissolve with his electoral defeat. This paradox sits at the heart of recent scholarship emerging from the Journal of Politics in Latin America, which asks a question of profound relevance for scholars of comparative politics and civil society: how do far-right political alignments endure beyond the electoral fortunes of their founding figures? The answer to this question carries implications not only for Brazil and Latin America, but for the broader global debate about democratic backsliding, political polarization, and the structural preconditions that allow illiberal politics to take root.
The article under review addresses two interrelated research questions that together illuminate the mechanisms behind Bolsonaro's enduring political legacy. The first concerns the emergence of a coherent far-right ideological project in Brazil — a country long associated with a more pragmatic, coalition-oriented style of conservative politics rather than the doctrinaire right-wing populism more commonly observed in Southern Europe or the United States. Brazil's political tradition under figures such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso or even the centrist pragmatism of Michel Temer did not obviously prefigure the Bolsonaro phenomenon. Yet the article's framing suggests that Bolsonaro's movement was not an aberration but rather a consolidation of pre-existing political currents — evangelical Christian conservatism, agribusiness interests, elements of the military-adjacent security establishment, and a deeply disaffected middle class alienated by the Petista governance model and scandalized by the revelations of the Lava Jato corruption investigations. The second question, arguably the more theoretically significant of the two, concerns why this alignment persisted after the 2022 defeat. Here, the analytical contribution is substantial: it pushes back against event-driven interpretations of political change and insists on structural, organizational, and ideological explanations for political durability.
The consolidation of a far-right alignment in Brazil must be understood against the backdrop of broader transformations in Latin American civil society and political economy. The region experienced a celebrated "Pink Tide" in the early 2000s, as left-leaning governments from Venezuela to Bolivia to Argentina introduced redistributive programs, expanded state capacity, and reoriented foreign policy toward regional integration and South-South cooperation. Brazil under Lula and Dilma Rousseff was a cornerstone of this regional moment, and its domestic successes — particularly the dramatic reduction in poverty and the expansion of formal employment — were widely cited as models. However, the commodity boom that underpinned much of this social progress was structurally fragile, and when commodity prices collapsed in the mid-2010s, the fiscal and political vulnerabilities of these governing coalitions became exposed. Brazil's political crisis of 2015–2016, culminating in the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, marked not merely a change of government but a rupture in the social contract that had organized Brazilian politics since re-democratization. Bolsonaro's rise should be read as a political response to this rupture — a mobilization of constituencies that had never been fully integrated into the Petista social coalition, and who found in Bolsonaro's combative, anti-institutional rhetoric an expressive vehicle for their grievances.
From a policy and research standpoint, the article's emphasis on consolidation rather than emergence has significant implications for how development practitioners and civil society actors should approach the post-Bolsonaro moment in Brazil. International ODA frameworks and civil society support programs operating in Brazil have largely been calibrated to a governance environment that assumed the gradual deepening of democratic institutions, robust civil society participation, and a policy orientation broadly compatible with multilateral development norms. The article's findings suggest that these assumptions require revision. A far-right alignment that has survived electoral defeat retains organizational infrastructure, ideological coherence, and the capacity to contest policy space — in the legislature, in subnational governments, in religious and community organizations, and in informal networks that intersect with formal political structures. For donors and international NGOs working on issues ranging from environmental governance in the Amazon to gender rights and indigenous land protection, the practical consequence is that political risk cannot be assessed solely by tracking the occupant of the executive palace in Brasília. Civil society organizations that expanded under the Lula restoration may face sustained pressure and opposition from a deeply entrenched counter-movement.
Looking forward, Brazil's experience with far-right consolidation invites the field of comparative politics to refine its theoretical tools for understanding what might be called "post-electoral persistence" — the capacity of a political movement to maintain structural influence and ideological salience even after losing control of the national executive. The scholarly literature on democratic backsliding has often focused on the executive-driven erosion of institutional checks, following the model of Hungary's Fidesz or Turkey under Erdoğan. Brazil offers a more complex scenario in which executive power was actually regained by the democratic center-left, yet the conditions that produced the far-right surge remain structurally present: economic inequality, institutional distrust, cleavages around religion and cultural identity, and a media and social media ecosystem that rewards confrontational, anti-establishment messaging. Researchers and practitioners operating in the Latin American context would do well to resist the temptation of interpreting the 2022 Lula victory as a decisive resolution of Brazil's political crisis. The deeper analytical task — one to which this article contributes meaningfully — is to understand the conditions under which far-right alignments either attenuate over time or reproduce themselves across electoral cycles, and to identify the institutional designs, civil society capacities, and international partnerships that can most effectively strengthen democratic resilience in the face of sustained illiberal pressure.