Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-27
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The global resurgence of far-right political movements over the past decade has generated substantial scholarly debate about whether such phenomena represent temporary electoral accidents or more durable ideological realignments within democratic systems. Brazil's experience under Jair Bolsonaro and its aftermath offers one of the most instructive case studies for this question. Unlike many analogous movements in Europe or North America that arose from specific historical grievances or institutional peculiarities, Bolsonarismo emerged from and fed back into a society already undergoing profound structural transformations — in its religious landscape, its security politics, its digital information ecosystem, and its relationship to the state itself. A new study published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America takes this puzzle seriously, asking not merely how Bolsonaro came to power but how the movement he catalyzed has outlasted his 2022 electoral defeat, consolidating itself as a persistent force within Brazilian democracy rather than dissipating as a fleeting reaction to particular conjunctural conditions.
The central analytical contribution of the article lies in its insistence on distinguishing between electoral performance and ideological consolidation. Far-right movements are frequently assessed through the narrow lens of vote share, a metric that, while observable, misses the deeper question of whether such movements transform the ideological landscape permanently. Bolsonaro's defeat at the hands of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in October 2022 was, by this reading, not a repudiation of the far-right project but rather a change of personnel in the executive office while the underlying political infrastructure remained largely intact. The movement had, by that point, colonized significant portions of the legislative branch, established robust networks among evangelical congregations, military circles, and agribusiness interests, and cultivated a media and social media ecosystem capable of sustaining its messaging independent of formal party machinery. This layered institutionalization is what the authors likely mean by "consolidation" — a process by which an initially personalist movement diffuses its core commitments across multiple organizational sites, reducing its dependence on any single electoral outcome or charismatic figure.
This finding connects to a broader pattern observable across Latin America and beyond, where the relationship between democratic procedures and far-right consolidation has become increasingly ambiguous. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán's Fidesz demonstrated how electoral majorities could be used to restructure institutional frameworks in ways that outlast any particular governing cycle. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele's model of executive-driven populism has attracted admiration from Brazilian far-right actors as a template for combining democratic legitimacy with authoritarian governance. In Argentina, Javier Milei's 2023 electoral victory signaled that the regional far-right wave was far from spent, even as Bolsonaro faced legal jeopardy. What emerges across these cases is not a simple correlation between economic grievance and far-right voting, but a more complex process of ideological identity formation in which voters develop durable attachments to a political community, a worldview, and a set of enemies that persist across electoral cycles. Brazil under and after Bolsonaro is thus not an anomaly but a paradigm case for understanding how far-right projects survive their first encounters with electoral reversal.
For scholars of civil society and development, the Brazilian case carries implications that extend well beyond electoral analysis. The Bolsonaro years witnessed a systematic effort to reshape civil society itself — defunding feminist and LGBTQ+ organizations, restructuring environmental governance bodies, and redirecting state support toward evangelical and socially conservative associations. The article's focus on the endurance of the far-right project after 2022 raises the uncomfortable possibility that these reconfigurations of civil society were not simply policies that a subsequent government could reverse by decree, but represented deeper shifts in the organizational ecology of Brazilian public life. International donors, including bilateral ODA agencies and multilateral development institutions, have long operated on the assumption that civil society organizations serve as a counterweight to state capture and democratic backsliding. The Brazilian experience challenges this assumption by demonstrating how civil society can itself be a terrain of far-right consolidation, with well-resourced networks of religious and community organizations actively sustaining an anti-pluralist political project. Development practitioners working in similar environments will need to reckon seriously with the question of which civil society actors they are strengthening and toward what ends.
Looking forward, the trajectories opened by this research suggest that the study of far-right politics in Latin America must become more longitudinal, more institutionally granular, and more attentive to the transnational circuits through which ideas, tactics, and resources flow between movements. Bolsonarismo did not develop in isolation; it drew on templates from the global far-right, adapted them to Brazilian conditions, and in turn became a reference point for adjacent movements elsewhere in the hemisphere. As Lula's government navigates the challenges of governing in a politically polarized country with a hostile congressional bloc and a still-mobilized far-right base, the question of whether Brazilian democracy can reconsolidate around pluralist norms without first addressing the organizational infrastructure of the far-right project will be decisive. Researchers at institutions focused on global civil society and political economy are well positioned to contribute to this analysis by tracking the longer-term effects of the Bolsonaro years on associational life, on international partnerships, and on the normative frameworks that undergird democratic governance across the region. The article under review represents a valuable intervention in this effort, reframing the question of far-right politics from one of electoral volatility to one of structural transformation — a reframing with consequences for both scholarship and practice.