[JPLA] Beyond Electoral Fortunes: The Consolidation of a Far-Right Alignment in Brazil

Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America  |  Published: 2026-09-19

Category: 정권·선거 변동  |  Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics

The consolidation of far-right political movements across Latin America has become one of the defining features of the region's political economy over the past decade, and Brazil sits at the center of this transformation. Since Jair Bolsonaro's rise to the presidency in 2018, and even more so following his narrow electoral defeat in 2022, observers of Brazilian and comparative politics have grappled with a puzzle: why do far-right movements that lose executive power often continue to shape the political terrain long after the ballots are counted? This question has taken on renewed urgency amid the events of January 8, 2023, when supporters of the defeated president stormed federal buildings in Brasília, and amid the subsequent legal proceedings against Bolsonaro and his allies. The article under review, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, addresses precisely this puzzle by examining how Bolsonarismo has evolved from an electoral vehicle into a durable ideological and organizational alignment within Brazilian politics, one that persists independently of its founder's access to formal state power.

The core contribution of the article lies in its reframing of Bolsonarismo not as a transient personalist project tied to electoral cycles, but as a consolidated political alignment with its own institutional logic, social base, and capacity for reproduction. This distinction matters analytically because much of the earlier literature on right-wing populism in Latin America treated figures like Bolsonaro primarily through the lens of charismatic leadership and electoral mobilization, implicitly suggesting that defeat at the polls would substantially weaken the movement. By contrast, the article's framing—emphasizing consolidation "beyond electoral fortunes"—suggests that the movement has developed mechanisms of continuity: entrenched networks within the legislature and among state governors, a durable coalition with evangelical constituencies and agribusiness interests, and an information ecosystem built on social media platforms that continues to sustain mobilization independent of any single election outcome. This has important implications for how scholars should model the durability of far-right politics: rather than treating populist surges as inherently fragile phenomena that dissipate once their leader is removed from office, the Brazilian case suggests that such movements can institutionalize themselves into the party system and civil society in ways that outlast individual electoral defeats.

This dynamic resonates with broader trends across Latin America and the Global South more generally, where the retreat of traditional party structures has created space for movements that combine populist appeals with organized, well-resourced networks of civil society actors, media outlets, and religious institutions. In Brazil specifically, the alignment between Bolsonarismo and evangelical churches has proven to be a particularly resilient axis of mobilization, one that operates through community-level institutions largely insulated from the ebbs and flows of national electoral politics. This pattern echoes developments observed in other middle-income democracies, from Hungary to India to the Philippines, where far-right or illiberal political projects have similarly sought to embed themselves within civil society and subnational governance structures rather than relying solely on national executive power. For researchers and practitioners engaged with civil society studies, this raises an uncomfortable but necessary observation: civil society is not intrinsically a democratizing force, and the same organizational infrastructures that in other contexts support pluralism and rights-based advocacy can, in the Brazilian case, serve as vehicles for the consolidation of exclusionary and anti-institutional political projects.

The implications for policy and for international development actors engaged in Brazil and the broader region are significant. Donor agencies, multilateral institutions, and civil society support organizations operating in Latin America have often designed programming around the assumption that democratic backsliding is primarily an executive-branch phenomenon, addressable through support for electoral institutions, judicial independence, and formal checks and balances. The consolidation described in this article suggests that such interventions, while necessary, are insufficient if they do not also account for the subnational, religious, and media-based infrastructures through which far-right alignments reproduce themselves. This has direct relevance for ODA and civil society support strategies: programs aimed at strengthening democratic resilience in Brazil and comparable contexts may need to engage more directly with the plural and sometimes contested nature of civil society itself, rather than treating it as a uniformly pro-democratic sector. It also raises questions for governance and anti-corruption programming, since durable far-right alignments often intersect with efforts to weaken oversight institutions, environmental regulation, and human rights protections—areas of long-standing donor engagement in Brazil.

Looking forward, this research invites both scholars and practitioners to move beyond election-cycle analysis when assessing the health of democratic institutions in Brazil and similar contexts. For researchers, the challenge is to develop more robust frameworks for tracking the institutionalization of political movements across electoral defeats—frameworks that incorporate subnational data, religious and civil society network mapping, and digital media analysis alongside traditional electoral indicators. For practitioners in the development and civil society support space, the findings underscore the importance of long-horizon engagement strategies that do not disengage simply because a favored electoral outcome has been achieved, since the underlying political-organizational infrastructure of opposing movements may remain largely intact. As Brazil approaches its next electoral cycles and as similar far-right alignments continue to consolidate in other parts of Latin America and beyond, this line of inquiry offers a valuable corrective to overly optimistic readings of electoral turnover as a proxy for democratic renewal, and it points toward a research and policy agenda attentive to the deeper structural persistence of illiberal political projects.

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