Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-09-10
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
Brazil's 2022 presidential election, in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva narrowly defeated incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, was widely read at the time as a decisive rebuke of far-right politics in Latin America's largest democracy. Yet the events that followed—most dramatically the January 8, 2023 assault on the seats of government in Brasília—revealed that Bolsonaro's political project did not end with his electoral defeat. This tension between electoral loss and ideological persistence is precisely the puzzle addressed by this article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, which examines how a far-right alignment took root in Brazilian politics and why it has proven durable even as its central figure has faced legal jeopardy, an eight-year ban from running for office, and diminished institutional standing. The question matters well beyond Brazil's borders: across the globe, from Washington to Warsaw, scholars are grappling with how populist-nationalist movements survive the loss of executive power, and Brazil offers one of the most consequential test cases in the Global South.
The article's central contribution lies in shifting analytical attention away from Bolsonaro as an individual and toward the broader alignment of social, institutional, and ideological forces that his presidency (2019–2022) helped crystallize. Rather than treating Bolsonarismo as a personalistic phenomenon destined to fade with its founder's political eclipse, the analysis frames it as a durable coalition binding together evangelical Christian networks, agribusiness interests, segments of the security and military apparatus, and a digitally mobilized base radicalized through years of disinformation and conspiracy narratives. This reframing matters analytically because it explains a puzzle that purely electoral models struggle with: why far-right candidates aligned with Bolsonarismo continued to perform strongly in gubernatorial and congressional races even as Bolsonaro himself lost the presidency, and why the movement has retained the capacity to mobilize mass street demonstrations and shape legislative agendas from outside the executive branch. The consolidation the article describes is not merely rhetorical continuity but institutional embedding—in state legislatures, in municipal councils, in evangelical church networks, and in an alternative media ecosystem that continues to construct and circulate a shared political identity independent of any single office-holder.
This dynamic resonates with broader patterns that IOCSS researchers have tracked across the political economy of development and civil society globally. Latin America has historically been a bellwether for global ideological currents, from the left turns of the early 2000s to the more recent proliferation of anti-establishment and religiously inflected right-wing movements. Brazil's experience parallels developments in Hungary, India, and the United States, where far-right coalitions have similarly demonstrated an ability to outlast individual electoral defeats by embedding themselves in civil society organizations, religious institutions, and parallel information infrastructures rather than depending solely on control of the state apparatus. For scholars of civil society and ODA-recipient democracies, this is a critical corrective to assumptions that democratic backsliding is reversible simply through electoral alternation. When illiberal movements build durable organizational infrastructure—as this article suggests Bolsonarismo has done through evangelical networks and agribusiness lobbies—the restoration of democratic norms requires far more than a single election result; it requires sustained institutional and civil-society-level contestation.
The policy implications of this analysis are significant for both domestic Brazilian governance and international development partners. For the Lula administration, the durability of a far-right alignment in Congress and in state governments constrains policy space on issues ranging from environmental regulation in the Amazon to social welfare expansion, since a substantial and organized opposition bloc can obstruct legislation and use judicial and legislative tools to contest executive authority. For international donors and development agencies engaged in supporting civil society and democratic governance in Brazil, the findings suggest that programming focused narrowly on electoral integrity or short-term political monitoring may be insufficient; sustained investment in pluralistic civil society organizations, independent media literacy, and cross-sectoral dialogue with evangelical and rural constituencies may be necessary to counterbalance a well-organized far-right ecosystem. This also bears on broader ODA strategy in Latin America, where donor governments and multilateral organizations must increasingly account for the resilience of illiberal political networks when designing governance and democracy-support programs, rather than treating democratic consolidation as a linear, election-driven process.
Looking forward, this research invites practitioners and scholars to treat far-right consolidation as a structural feature of contemporary Brazilian politics rather than a transient anomaly tied to one leader's electoral fortunes. As Brazil approaches its next electoral cycle, researchers will need to monitor whether the alignment identified in this article continues to cohere in the absence of Bolsonaro's direct candidacy, given his current ineligibility, or whether internal competition among potential successors fragments the coalition. For the broader field of comparative politics and civil society studies, the Brazilian case offers a template for analyzing how populist and far-right movements elsewhere—including in other middle-income democracies undergoing rapid social and religious change—might similarly outlive individual leaders by embedding themselves in durable social coalitions. For IOCSS and similar institutes tracking the interplay of political economy, civil society, and development outcomes, this suggests a research agenda that pays closer attention not only to election outcomes but to the underlying organizational architecture—religious, economic, and informational—that sustains political movements between and beyond election cycles.