Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-12
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across democratic states has been one of the defining features of the early twenty-first century, challenging long-held assumptions about the liberal democratic consensus that followed the Cold War. In Latin America, this trend has taken on particular urgency given the region's fraught historical relationship with authoritarianism, military governance, and ideologically-driven state violence. Brazil, the region's largest democracy by population and economic weight, became a focal point for these global anxieties when Jair Bolsonaro rose to the presidency in 2019 and subsequently refused to accept his electoral defeat in 2022. The scholarly literature that has emerged in the wake of this episode is therefore not merely of local significance — it bears directly on how researchers and policymakers understand the structural conditions that allow far-right ideological projects to outlast their most visible political carriers. A forthcoming article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America addresses precisely this question by examining the consolidation of a far-right political alignment in Brazil, analyzing how Bolsonarismo became something more durable than the electoral fortunes of a single candidate.
The article's central contribution lies in its insistence on treating Brazil's far-right turn not as an aberration produced by Bolsonaro's personal charisma or by conjunctural crises alone, but as the product of a sustained ideological alignment with roots in organized social sectors, evangelical Christian networks, agrarian elites, security forces, and portions of the urban middle class that felt economically and culturally displaced by the Workers' Party's long tenure in power. This framing is analytically significant because it shifts attention away from personality-driven explanations — which tend to assume that the defeat of the leader signals the exhaustion of the movement — and toward structural accounts that map the social and institutional infrastructure through which far-right politics reproduces itself. By centering the question of consolidation rather than emergence, the article implicitly engages the comparative literature on democratic backsliding, which has increasingly recognized that the erosion of liberal norms does not require a clean authoritarian break but can proceed through the gradual colonization of democratic institutions by anti-pluralist actors.
Two research questions appear to animate the analysis: first, how did Bolsonaro's ideological project achieve a degree of organizational and social coherence that allowed it to survive electoral defeat; and second, what does the persistence of this alignment mean for the trajectory of Brazilian democracy under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's returned presidency. These questions connect to a broader debate in comparative politics about whether populist radical-right movements are best understood as dependent variables of conjunctural crisis or as independent variables capable of reshaping the political field even after their leaders depart from executive power. The Brazilian case is particularly instructive here because the 2022 transition occurred under conditions of acute polarization, sustained misinformation campaigns, and a failed coup attempt on January 8, 2023, when Bolsonaro supporters stormed federal institutions in Brasília. That these events did not produce either a definitive rupture with democracy or a swift demobilization of the far-right base suggests that the movement possesses resources of cohesion that require systematic scholarly explanation rather than dismissal as a temporary convulsion.
For researchers and practitioners in the fields of civil society and development, the Brazilian case carries implications that extend well beyond electoral politics. The Bolsonaro years saw a systematic assault on civil society organizations, scientific institutions, environmental oversight bodies, and international cooperation frameworks — including significant friction with multilateral ODA mechanisms focused on Amazon conservation and indigenous rights. The mobilization of evangelical networks and agrarian lobby groups within the Bolsonaro coalition illustrates how far-right political alignments can instrumentalize civil society infrastructure, hollowing out its pluralist function while preserving its organizational form. This dynamic is not unique to Brazil: similar patterns of what scholars have called "civil society capture" have been documented in Hungary, India, and Uganda, where ruling coalitions have used legal pressure, funding restrictions, and parallel organizat ional development to reshape the civic space in their favor. Understanding how far-right consolidation interacts with civil society fragmentation is therefore a pressing research agenda for scholars concerned with the conditions of aid effectiveness and inclusive governance more broadly.
Looking forward, the durability of the Bolsonarista alignment in Brazil will likely depend on whether the movement can translate its social base into stable legislative and subnational power, as well as on whether the Lula administration succeeds in delivering on economic inclusion and institutional repair without triggering the kinds of distributional anxieties that historically fuel right-wing reaction. The article's contribution is to remind both scholars and practitioners that democratic recovery is not guaranteed by electoral outcomes alone, and that the consolidation of far-right political identities across a generation of voters creates path-dependencies that structural reform must actively address rather than assume will dissolve with time. For the field of civil society studies, this means taking seriously the ways in which illiberal politics reshapes civic norms, associational life, and the legitimacy of international development partnerships — questions that will remain central to the political economy of Latin America's largest nation for years to come.