Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-09-11
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
Beyond Electoral Fortunes: The Consolidation of a Far-Right Alignment in Brazil
The political trajectory of Jair Bolsonaro has become one of the most consequential case studies for understanding how far-right movements outlast the individual leaders who initially propel them to power. Nearly four years after his 2022 electoral defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil remains a country in which Bolsonarismo continues to shape legislative behavior, judicial confrontations, and the ideological terrain of public debate. This matters well beyond Brazil's borders. As democracies across Latin America, Europe, and North America grapple with the durability of populist right movements that persist after their founding figures lose office, are prosecuted, or are barred from future candidacies, Brazil offers an unusually rich and closely observed laboratory. The article under review, appearing in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, directly engages this question by tracing how Bolsonaro's political project has evolved from an electoral vehicle into something resembling a durable ideological alignment within Brazilian institutions and society.
The article's central analytical move is to decouple the fate of Bolsonarismo from the personal political fortunes of Bolsonaro himself. Rather than treating his 2022 loss, subsequent legal jeopardy, and formal ineligibility to run for office as evidence of the movement's decline, the authors argue that these setbacks have not eroded—and may have even hardened—the coalition's ideological cohesion. This is a meaningful departure from conventional political science treatments of personalist right-wing movements, which often assume that removing the charismatic leader from the electoral arena precipitates fragmentation among followers, elites, and allied parties. Instead, the study documents mechanisms of consolidation: the entrenchment of Bolsonarista figures within Congress, state governorships, and municipal councils; the normalization of culture-war framing around gender, security, and national sovereignty in mainstream political discourse; and the construction of a shared victimhood narrative around judicial and electoral institutions that has proven remarkably effective at maintaining base loyalty even in the absence of a viable presidential candidacy for Bolsonaro himself. This suggests that scholars should treat far-right consolidation as a process operating at multiple institutional levels simultaneously, rather than as a phenomenon reducible to the singular fortunes of a national executive.
Situating this within broader regional and global patterns, Brazil's experience resonates strongly with trends observed elsewhere in Latin America's ongoing realignment away from the "pink tide" governance model that dominated the early 2000s. Countries such as Argentina, with the ascent of Javier Milei's libertarian-nationalist coalition, and El Salvador, under Nayib Bukele's security-first authoritarian populism, illustrate a broader regional pattern in which right-wing movements are proving adept at institutionalizing themselves through legislative capture, judicial confrontation, and media ecosystems that operate independently of any single leader's electoral viability. This has direct implications for how international donors, multilateral development institutions, and civil society organizations engaged in democracy and governance programming understand the region. Organizations that have historically calibrated their ODA-funded democratic strengthening and civil society support programs around electoral cycles—assuming that a change in executive leadership signals a corresponding shift in the political environment for civil society actors—may need to recognize that far-right alignments can retain structural power and social legitimacy well beyond a single electoral defeat. This has practical consequences for programming continuity, risk assessment, and the calibration of support to human rights defenders, environmental activists, and marginalized communities who continue to face a hostile political and social climate even under a nominally more sympathetic national government.
The policy implications extend into several domains relevant to IOCSS's core mandate around civil society and global political economy. First, funders and technical assistance providers working on judicial independence and electoral integrity in Brazil and comparable contexts should recognize that institutional attacks on courts and electoral commissions are not incidental byproducts of a single leader's grievances but rather constitutive elements of a broader ideological project designed to delegitimize the very referees of democratic competition. Second, the persistence of Bolsonarista influence within subnational governments carries significant implications for civil society organizations operating in Brazil's interior and in states where local Bolsonarista officials control resources, permits, and security apparatuses that directly affect the operating space for NGOs, indigenous rights groups, and environmental defenders in the Amazon and Cerrado regions. Third, the international donor community's engagement with Brazil's federal government under Lula should not be read as a wholesale normalization of the political environment; rather, a bifurcated landscape persists in which federal-level policy shifts coexist with an entrenched and often hostile far-right presence at other levels of governance, a dynamic that requires more granular, subnational analysis in risk and opportunity assessments than country-level narratives typically provide.
Looking forward, this article's framework invites researchers and practitioners to move beyond a narrow preoccupation with electoral outcomes as the primary metric of far-right strength or weakness. As Brazil approaches its next electoral cycles amid ongoing legal proceedings against Bolsonaro and continued maneuvering among potential successor figures within his coalition, the more analytically productive question is not whether Bolsonarismo can win the presidency again in any single cycle, but whether its ideological infrastructure—its media networks, its congressional blocs, its capture of security and evangelical constituencies, and its narrative of institutional grievance—continues to expand its footprint within Brazilian civil society and state institutions. For researchers, this argues for longitudinal, multi-level research designs that track far-right consolidation across legislative, judicial, and subnational governmental arenas rather than relying solely on presidential polling and vote share. For practitioners in the development and civil society support space, it argues for sustained, risk-aware engagement that does not treat a single electoral defeat as the resolution of a broader democratic challenge, but rather as one data point within a longer and more contested struggle over the character of Brazilian democracy.