Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-21
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The rise and persistence of far-right political movements across Latin America have forced scholars, development practitioners, and civil society actors to reconsider long-held assumptions about democratic consolidation in the Global South. Brazil, long regarded as one of the hemisphere's most complex and resilient democracies, has become a crucial test case for understanding whether democratic institutions can absorb, constrain, and ultimately outlast authoritarian populist movements once they achieve state power. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, interrogates a question that goes well beyond Brazil's borders: what happens to a far-right ideological project when its primary electoral vehicle loses? By analyzing the emergence and durability of Bolsonarism beyond the 2022 presidential defeat of Jair Bolsonaro, the study makes a significant contribution not only to Brazilian political science but to the comparative study of democratic backsliding and the resilience of illiberal coalitions globally.
The article's central analytical contribution lies in its refusal to treat electoral outcomes as definitive measures of ideological vitality. Too often, political analysts conflate a movement's loss of executive power with its institutional and cultural decline. The authors challenge this conflation directly by demonstrating that Bolsonarism — understood as a coherent ideological alignment anchored in social conservatism, militarism, anti-institutionalism, and a particular vision of Brazilian national identity — did not dissolve with the 2022 defeat. Instead, the movement exhibited what the article characterizes as consolidation: a deepening and hardening of organizational networks, cultural infrastructure, and political identity among its base. This distinction between electoral fortune and ideological entrenchment is analytically powerful because it shifts attention away from the presidency as the sole locus of political power and toward the broader ecosystem of parties, media platforms, religious institutions, and grassroots networks through which far-right politics reproduces itself over time.
Understanding how Bolsonarism entrenched itself requires situating it within the structural conditions that enabled its emergence in the first place. Brazil's democratic framework, while formally robust, has long been characterized by deep institutional fragmentation, a crisis of party system legitimacy, and severe socioeconomic inequality that periodically fuels anti-establishment sentiment. The Workers' Party (PT) governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff, despite their genuine achievements in poverty reduction and social inclusion, became associated in the public imagination — particularly among the middle classes and conservative evangelicals — with corruption scandals and cultural liberalism perceived as threatening to traditional values. Bolsonaro did not create the social conditions for far-right mobilization; he channeled and amplified pre-existing resentments. The article's focus on consolidation implies that those resentments have not been resolved by Lula's return to power, and that the structural conditions underpinning them — economic anxiety, cultural polarization, institutional distrust — remain potent. This is a sobering finding for anyone invested in Brazil's democratic trajectory.
The implications for civil society are particularly significant from an ODA and development policy perspective. Brazil's civil society sector is one of the largest and most diverse in the world, encompassing human rights organizations, environmental advocacy groups, Indigenous rights movements, and faith-based social service providers. During the Bolsonaro years, organized civil society faced systematic pressure: funding cuts to environmental monitoring agencies, weakening of Indigenous land protections, rollback of gender and sexuality policy, and a broader delegitimization of NGOs as foreign-funded subversive actors. The consolidation of far-right alignment described in this article suggests that these pressures did not disappear with the election of Lula's coalition in October 2022. Bolsonarist networks continue to operate in Congress, in state governments, in the military, and in the extensive evangelical church infrastructure, all of which can constrain the policy space available to progressive civil society actors. For international development organizations — whether bilateral donors, multilateral agencies, or transnational NGOs — this means that partnering with Brazilian civil society organizations remains a politically complex undertaking requiring careful contextual analysis of the power dynamics within which partners operate.
The article also speaks to a broader global phenomenon that scholars of comparative politics have been grappling with throughout the 2020s. From Hungary and Poland to India and the Philippines, far-right movements have demonstrated a capacity to reshape political systems in ways that outlast their formal hold on executive power. They achieve this through a combination of institutional capture — packing courts, restructuring bureaucracies, altering electoral rules — and cultural consolidation, normalizing previously marginal ideas and building loyal constituencies that view the movement's project as inseparable from national identity itself. Brazil fits this comparative pattern closely, and the article's contribution is to document it empirically within the Brazilian context with the analytical rigor that comparative politics demands. The January 8, 2023 attacks on Brazil's governmental buildings — carried out by Bolsonaro supporters days after Lula's inauguration — illustrated dramatically that a defeated electoral coalition can remain a potent disruptive force capable of challenging the transfer of power itself.
For researchers and practitioners looking forward, the article raises several pressing questions that will shape the field for years to come. How should scholars measure ideological consolidation independently of electoral performance, and what methodological innovations are needed to do so robustly? For ODA practitioners specifically, what does the persistence of authoritarian-leaning political infrastructure mean for the design of democratic governance programming in countries like Brazil? There is a risk, well-documented in the aid effectiveness literature, of programming that treats democracy as a technical problem of institutional design rather than a political contest over power and values. The dynamics described in this article suggest that democratic consolidation in Brazil will depend less on institutional engineering than on the capacity of progressive political coalitions and civil society actors to build durable social bases that can contest far-right cultural hegemony at the local and community level over the long term. Brazil's trajectory will be watched closely, not merely as a national story, but as a leading indicator of whether Third Wave democracies can recover meaningful democratic substance after sustained exposure to authoritarian populism — a question that now resonates from Brasília to Budapest and beyond.