Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-08-20
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The rise and apparent durability of far-right political movements represents one of the defining challenges of contemporary democratic governance, and nowhere is this phenomenon more consequential — or more analytically complex — than in Brazil. As the world's fourth-largest democracy and Latin America's largest economy, Brazil's political trajectory carries weight far beyond its borders. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 was widely interpreted at the time as part of a broader global wave of right-wing populism, bracketed alongside figures such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Donald Trump in the United States. Yet what the article published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America makes clear is that the Brazilian case demands analysis on its own terms — not merely as an instance of a global template, but as a far-right realignment with structural properties that outlast any single electoral cycle. Understanding why Bolsonarismo persists despite its leader's 2022 defeat is not simply a matter of political curiosity; it has direct implications for how development practitioners, civil society organizations, and international funders understand political risk, institutional resilience, and the conditions under which civic space can be defended or eroded.
The central analytical contribution of this article, as published in Volume 18, Issue 2 of the Journal of Politics in Latin America in August 2026, lies in its insistence on disaggregating electoral performance from ideological consolidation. The conventional framework for evaluating populist movements tends to treat elections as the primary diagnostic tool: a movement that wins is "rising," and one that loses is "declining." What the authors challenge is precisely this conflation. Bolsonaro's loss to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022 was narrow — fewer than two percentage points in the second round — and the broader Bolsonarista coalition achieved substantial gains at the legislative level. More importantly, the article argues that the organizational infrastructure, the cultural narratives, and the networked loyalties that constitute Bolsonarismo were not artifacts of electoral mobilization but rather constitutive elements of a self-reproducing political identity. In this reading, the movement is less dependent on Bolsonaro himself than its personalist branding might suggest. The consolidation of far-right alignment in Brazil is, in other words, a structural phenomenon rather than a conjunctural one, and the distinction matters enormously for how we think about democratic backsliding and recovery.
The article's findings resonate powerfully with broader regional and global trends in the political economy of right-wing mobilization. Across Latin America, the period since the mid-2010s has seen a marked erosion of the "Pink Tide" consensus and the emergence of durable right-wing coalitions in countries including Argentina under Javier Milei, El Salvador under Nayib Bukele, and Ecuador under a succession of security-focused administrations. What links these cases is not simply a rejection of left-wing economic policy, though that is certainly present, but a deeper cultural politics rooted in anti-institutionalism, evangelical Christian mobilization, and the weaponization of social media ecosystems that bypass traditional gatekeepers in journalism and civil society. In Brazil, Bolsonaro's relationship with the military, the agribusiness sector, and the evangelical community created a coalition that proved more cohesive and more ideologically coherent than many analysts anticipated. The article's framing invites comparison with scholarship on "competitive authoritarianism" and "democratic erosion," suggesting that even where formal democratic procedures remain intact, the substantive quality of democratic competition can be significantly degraded when one political bloc maintains institutional footholds across the judiciary, military command structures, and municipal governments.
For practitioners and scholars working in the areas of ODA, civil society strengthening, and governance reform, the implications of this analysis are sobering but clarifying. International development actors have long relied on electoral milestones — transitions of power, constitutional referenda, legislative elections — as proxies for democratic health. The Brazilian case suggests that this reliance can be misleading. A government that formally respects electoral outcomes may nonetheless preside over an environment in which civil society organizations are surveilled, defunded, or delegitimized; in which judicial independence is selectively undermined; and in which the public sphere is saturated with disinformation that makes civic deliberation structurally difficult. For organizations designing democracy and governance programming in contexts where far-right movements have achieved the kind of sub-institutional consolidation the article describes, the entry points for intervention need to shift. Supporting independent journalism, protecting the legal standing of civil society organizations, and building coalitions that can contest the cultural narratives of far-right movements may be as important as monitoring electoral integrity in the narrow procedural sense.
Looking forward, the Brazilian case poses a question that is likely to define political science and development studies discourse for the next decade: what does democratic recovery actually require when the opposition that lost an election retains deep roots in state institutions, security forces, and mass culture? The Lula government's efforts at institutional normalization have proceeded under conditions of persistent right-wing pressure, and the 2026 electoral cycle will test whether the far-right alignment described in this article proves capable of returning to executive power. For researchers, the article's framework offers a productive corrective to overly electoralist approaches and points toward the need for longitudinal, multi-level analysis that tracks ideological consolidation across institutional domains simultaneously. For practitioners, it underscores the urgency of investing in civic resilience not only during moments of acute crisis but as a sustained, structural commitment — one that recognizes that far-right movements, once consolidated, do not simply dissolve when they lose a vote count.