Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements over the past decade has compelled scholars, development practitioners, and civil society organizations to revisit foundational assumptions about democratic consolidation and the relationship between electoral outcomes and ideological persistence. Brazil, as the world's largest Portuguese-speaking nation and one of Latin America's most consequential democracies, occupies a particularly instructive position in this debate. The rise and partial electoral retreat of Jair Bolsonaro — a former army captain whose presidency from 2019 to 2022 reshaped Brazil's political landscape in profound and enduring ways — offers a case study not merely in populist governance but in the organizational and cultural infrastructure that sustains radical-right movements even after their standard-bearers lose power. This analytical question sits at the heart of the article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, which moves beyond the mechanics of the 2022 presidential election to interrogate how Bolsonarismo, as a political and social phenomenon, has entrenched itself within Brazilian institutions, communities, and collective identities in ways that electoral defeat alone cannot undo.
The central argument advanced in the article concerns what the authors term the consolidation of a far-right alignment — a concept that deliberately separates the fortunes of a movement from the electoral trajectory of its figurehead. Bolsonaro's loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022 was a genuinely close contest decided in the second round, with Bolsonaro capturing roughly 49 percent of the vote. That margin alone should arrest any analyst tempted to read the result as a wholesale rejection of the far-right project. The article's contribution is to trace the mechanisms through which Bolsonaro's ideological coalition — drawing on evangelical Protestant networks, agrarian capital, security sector loyalties, and anti-establishment middle-class sentiment — has achieved a degree of institutional sedimentation that transcends the personal charisma of any single leader. This analysis resonates with broader comparative literature on right-wing populism, particularly in contexts where movements exploit democratic institutions to embed themselves within the very structures they rhetorically denounce. The Brazilian case illustrates this paradox vividly: a movement that positioned itself against the political establishment succeeded in colonizing significant portions of it, from municipal governments to the judiciary to the armed forces' informal political culture.
From the perspective of civil society studies, the findings carry unsettling implications. One of the distinctive features of Bolsonarismo identified in the literature is its hostile posture toward organized civil society, multilateral institutions, and the NGO ecosystem that had historically mediated between the Brazilian state and marginalized communities. During Bolsonaro's presidency, federal agencies responsible for indigenous affairs, environmental protection, and social assistance were systematically weakened, budgets for civil society partnerships were slashed, and prominent activists faced harassment facilitated by networks with ties to the administration. The persistence of the far-right alignment documented in this article suggests that these pressures have not dissolved with the change of government. Civil society organizations operating in Brazil's Amazon region, quilombola territories, and peripheral urban zones continue to navigate an environment in which local and state-level Bolsonarista politicians retain significant power to obstruct federally funded programs. For international development actors and ODA-channel organizations, this creates a layered governance challenge: a nominally progressive federal government attempting to restore environmental and social protections while confronting organized resistance embedded within subnational political structures.
The broader regional and global dimensions of this phenomenon deserve sustained attention. Latin America in the mid-2020s presents a mosaic of political orientations, with left-leaning governments in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile coexisting with right-wing administrations elsewhere and with powerful conservative counter-movements throughout the region. What the Brazilian case demonstrates is that electoral cycles are increasingly poor proxies for the ideological direction of political systems. The organizational networks, digital media ecosystems, and religious-political alliances that animate far-right mobilization operate on timescales and through channels that formal democratic competition only partially captures. International observers focused narrowly on presidential elections risk misreading the actual terrain of political contestation. This insight is directly relevant to how development agencies and international foundations design civil society support programs: funding models premised on national government alignment may prove inadequate in contexts where subnational power remains organized around a competing ideological project. The consolidation documented in Brazil should prompt serious reconsideration of how ODA architecture accounts for intra-state political fragmentation and the durable organizational capacities of anti-pluralist movements.
Looking forward, the significance of this article lies in its implicit challenge to both optimistic transition narratives and simple authoritarian-backsliding frameworks. Brazil under Lula is neither a democracy fully restored nor a democracy in acute crisis — it is a democracy under sustained contestation, in which the far-right alignment has accepted electoral defeat as a tactical setback while continuing to build the social and institutional infrastructure for future mobilization. For researchers, this calls for longitudinal methodologies that track organizational persistence, elite network continuity, and ideological diffusion through media ecosystems rather than focusing exclusively on government composition. For practitioners in international civil society and development, it demands programming that supports the resilience of democratic infrastructure at the local and sectoral level — the courts, the press, subnational civil society, and the social movements that will bear the friction of political contestation regardless of who occupies the presidency. Brazil's experience in the years ahead will likely serve as a bellwether for how democracies in the Global South manage the long aftermath of far-right mobilization, making continued scholarly attention to this case both analytically urgent and practically indispensable.