Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-09-06
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
Bolsonarism after Bolsonaro: The Institutionalization of Brazil's Far-Right Realignment
The 2022 defeat of Jair Bolsonaro at the hands of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was widely read, both in Brazil and abroad, as a moment of democratic recovery — a signal that the country's electorate had rejected the polarizing populism, institutional erosion, and public health mismanagement that had defined the preceding four years. Yet more than three years later, the political landscape suggests a far more ambiguous outcome. Rather than dissolving with its founder's electoral loss, the far-right movement Bolsonaro built has continued to shape Brazilian politics, retaining substantial legislative power, dominant influence within evangelical and security-sector constituencies, and a durable capacity to set the terms of national debate. This persistence matters well beyond Brazil's borders. As democracies across the Global South and North alike grapple with the durability of right-wing populist coalitions after their standard-bearers lose power — from Trumpism in the United States to nationalist movements in India, Hungary, and the Philippines — Brazil offers a critical case study in how personalist political projects can outlive the individual leader and calcify into a structural feature of a political system.
The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, moves the scholarly conversation on Bolsonarism away from an excessive focus on electoral cycles and toward a more structural account of political alignment formation. Its central argument is that Bolsonaro's movement should not be understood merely as a personalist vehicle contingent on his own electoral fortunes, but as a coalition anchored in durable social cleavages — religious conservatism, anti-corruption resentment against the traditional political class, opposition to what is perceived as an overreaching judiciary and media establishment, and anxieties tied to crime, security, and rapid social change. By analyzing the movement's institutional footprint — its penetration of Congress, state legislatures, and municipal politics, as well as its embeddedness in evangelical church networks and among military and police constituencies — the authors demonstrate that the far right in Brazil has developed organizational infrastructure independent of any single election outcome. This is a meaningful departure from earlier scholarship that treated Bolsonaro's rise in 2018 as an anomalous protest vote against Workers' Party (PT) corruption scandals and economic malaise. The article instead frames 2018–2022 as the founding moment of a realignment whose consolidation phase is still ongoing, evidenced by the far right's strong performance in the 2022 legislative elections even as Bolsonaro lost the presidency, and by its continued mobilizational capacity in the aftermath, including around the January 8, 2023 attacks on federal buildings in Brasília.
This finding resonates with broader patterns of political economy and civil society research across Latin America and the wider developing world. Scholars of ODA and civic space have long observed that democratic backsliding is rarely a single event but rather a gradual reconfiguration of institutional norms, civil society ecosystems, and information environments — a process that can continue even after a change of government. Brazil's case illustrates how far-right movements can function analogously to other entrenched political machines in the region: they build parallel legitimacy structures through religious and community networks, cultivate media ecosystems (including WhatsApp and other social platforms) that operate outside the traditional fourth estate, and forge alliances with security-sector actors that outlast any single administration. This pattern echoes developments in other middle-income democracies confronting the tension between formal electoral turnover and substantive democratic resilience — Poland, Hungary, India, and the Philippines all present variations on the theme of a political minority converting cultural and institutional leverage into durable power that survives electoral defeat. For civil society organizations and donor institutions operating in Brazil and the broader region, this suggests that democratic support strategies focused narrowly on election monitoring or transitions of executive power may understate the deeper contestation occurring within legislatures, judiciaries, and civic space more broadly.
The policy and research implications of this consolidation thesis are substantial. For international development actors and democracy-assistance programs, the finding that far-right alignment in Brazil is institutionally embedded rather than personality-dependent implies that support for democratic resilience cannot be calibrated solely to presidential election cycles. Programs aimed at strengthening judicial independence, protecting investigative journalism, and sustaining civic space need to account for a political environment in which a substantial and organized minority retains both the incentive and the institutional means to challenge liberal democratic norms indefinitely. This also has implications for how donor agencies and multilateral bodies assess "democratic risk" in aid allocation and governance conditionality frameworks: a government led by a nominally pro-democratic executive, as Lula's currently is, may still preside over a legislature and judiciary contested by an entrenched far-right bloc capable of obstructing reform, protecting allies from accountability, or renewing mobilization around a future electoral cycle. For researchers, the article's emphasis on cleavage-based analysis rather than leader-centric narratives offers a methodologically useful corrective, encouraging future comparative work that measures the durability of populist coalitions through institutional penetration metrics — seat shares, judicial appointments, subnational control, and civil society alliances — rather than through polling data on a single figure's popularity.
Looking ahead, Brazil's 2026 general elections will serve as an important test of whether this far-right alignment can translate its institutional consolidation into a renewed claim on the presidency, whether through Bolsonaro himself (notwithstanding his ongoing legal disqualifications) or through a successor capable of inheriting the coalition's organizational assets. Regardless of the electoral outcome, the analytical framework advanced in this article suggests that observers should resist treating any single election as a definitive resolution of Brazil's democratic trajectory. For practitioners in the ODA and civil society support space, the more productive posture is one of sustained institutional monitoring — tracking legislative behavior, subnational governance, media capture, and civic space indicators over multiple electoral cycles rather than treating a single presidential outcome as a proxy for democratic health. For scholars, the Brazilian case reinforces a growing consensus that the durability of far-right political projects in the twenty-first century depends less on charismatic leadership than on the depth of their institutional and social embedding — a lesson with clear resonance for democracies well beyond Latin America.