Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-25
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The resurgence of far-right political movements across the democratic world has emerged as one of the defining tensions of the contemporary era, challenging long-held assumptions about the irreversibility of liberal democratic consolidation. In Latin America, this tension has been nowhere more consequential than in Brazil, where the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro between 2019 and 2022 represented not merely the electoral success of a populist outsider, but the crystallization of a durable ideological alignment that has continued to shape Brazilian politics well beyond his narrow defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022. A new article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America takes this phenomenon seriously on its own terms, refusing to treat Bolsonarismo as a temporary aberration tied to one man's charisma or fortune. Instead, the study asks a more structurally demanding question: what conditions allowed a far-right political project to achieve such organizational depth and ideological coherence that it survived electoral defeat without fragmentation? The answer carries implications that extend far beyond Brazil's borders, speaking to the durability of democratic backsliding and the limits of electoral outcomes as correctives to entrenched illiberal movements.
The article's central contribution lies in its insistence on distinguishing between electoral fortunes and political consolidation. Much of the academic and journalistic commentary on Bolsonaro's trajectory has focused on the drama of the 2022 election — the narrowness of his defeat, the extraordinary scenes of his supporters besieging government buildings in January 2023, and the question of whether Brazilian democracy would survive the transition. These are not trivial concerns, but they risk framing the phenomenon primarily as a crisis of institutions rather than a transformation of political society. What the Journal of Politics in Latin America article argues, implicitly or explicitly, is that the more consequential development is the consolidation of a coherent far-right bloc with its own organizational networks, ideological vocabulary, media ecosystem, and social base. Bolsonarismo, on this reading, did not lose the 2022 election and disappear; it lost and remained the largest organized political force on the Brazilian right, controlling significant representation in Congress, in state governments, and in the military and security apparatus. This distinction — between electoral defeat and political marginalization — is analytically crucial and methodologically demanding to sustain, requiring researchers to move beyond vote counts toward the sociology and organizational history of the movement.
Understanding the consolidation of the Bolsonaro alignment requires engagement with the longer structural history of the Brazilian right and its evolving relationship to democratic institutions. For decades following the military dictatorship that ended in 1985, the Brazilian right was characterized by fragmentation, clientelism, and ideological incoherence, operating largely through a system of transactional politics in which center-right parties served as vehicles for patronage rather than programmatic conservatism. The Workers' Party governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff between 2003 and 2016 paradoxically accelerated the transformation of this landscape by providing a coherent adversary around which a more doctrinaire conservatism could crystallize. The impeachment of Rousseff in 2016, the lawfare campaign that imprisoned Lula and excluded him from the 2018 election, and the broader crisis of the Petrobras corruption investigations all contributed to a political environment in which traditional mediating institutions — parties, the judiciary, the media — lost legitimacy simultaneously. Into this vacuum Bolsonaro stepped, but the vacuum itself had been decades in the making and was shaped by forces extending well beyond any individual politician's appeal.
The ideological content of Bolsonarismo also demands careful analysis, particularly for scholars working in the fields of ODA, civil society, and global political economy. The movement drew together strands that, in earlier moments, had been politically and socially distinct: evangelical Protestant mobilization against what was framed as a secular cultural agenda, agrarian and extractive capitalism hostile to indigenous rights and environmental regulation, military and security sector nostalgia for the authoritarian period, and a hyper-networked online base radicalized through social media disinformation ecosystems. What is analytically significant is that these constituencies were not simply brought together by Bolsonaro's personality but were woven into a common frame that identified liberal democratic norms, multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations as threats to national sovereignty, Christian civilization, and economic development. This framing has direct consequences for organizations operating in the development and civil society space in Brazil: under Bolsonaro, international NGOs, human rights monitors, and environmental advocacy groups faced systematic hostility, budget cuts, and in some cases criminalization. The article's analysis of ideological consolidation is therefore not only a contribution to comparative politics but a warning to practitioners about the structural conditions under which civic space contracts.
Globally, the Brazilian case sits within a pattern that development scholars and ODA practitioners have increasingly been forced to reckon with. The decade since 2016 has seen the rollback of civic space in countries as diverse as Hungary, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and Turkey — a trend catalogued by organizations such as CIVICUS and Freedom House but still inadequately theorized in development policy frameworks that were designed for a world in which democracy was assumed to be either stable or progressing. Brazil is particularly significant because it is the region's largest democracy, a founding member of the BRICS grouping, and a country whose environmental and social policies carry global consequences given the Amazon's role in planetary climate regulation. Bolsonaro's active hostility to the Paris Agreement and his facilitation of illegal deforestation were not peripheral features of his political project but were constitutive of his coalition, which depends structurally on agrarian and extractive interests opposed to international environmental governance. The consolidation of this alignment, even after electoral defeat, means that the policy reversals achieved under the Lula administration remain politically precarious, contingent on electoral outcomes that could again shift within a single electoral cycle.
For researchers and practitioners in development, civil society, and political economy, the article's findings suggest several forward-looking priorities. First, the field urgently needs analytical frameworks that can assess the durability of illiberal political alignments independently of electoral outcomes — frameworks capable of tracking organizational infrastructure, media ecosystems, legislative entrenchment, and security sector orientation as distinct dimensions of political power. Electoral democracy produces government turnover; it does not automatically produce ideological turnover, and treating them as equivalent leads to premature declarations of resilience. Second, civil society support strategies in countries experiencing far-right consolidation need to grapple with the hostile domestic political environment not merely as a contextual constraint but as the central challenge — asking how organizations can maintain operational capacity, legal status, and public legitimacy under conditions of sustained state hostility. Third, the Brazilian case reinforces the importance of understanding the transnational dimensions of far-right alignment: Bolsonarismo has drawn on, and contributed to, a global network of far-right movements, think tanks, and media operations that share resources, frames, and personnel across national borders, making purely national-level analysis insufficient. The consolidation of the far-right alignment in Brazil is, in the end, not only a story about one country or one politician; it is a case study in the political conditions under which democracy can survive electoral change while remaining structurally transformed, with consequences that will unfold over years and perhaps decades to come.