Source: Journal of Politics in Latin America | Published: 2026-07-31
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, electoral, far-right, politics
The persistence of radical right-wing movements beyond their electoral peaks has become one of the defining puzzles of contemporary democratic theory. Across much of the world, the assumption that far-right populist projects would dissolve upon losing office has proven stubbornly incorrect. Brazil's Bolsonarismo stands as perhaps the most instructive case in the Latin American context — a movement that absorbed Jair Bolsonaro's decisive defeat in the October 2022 presidential election and yet retained substantial organizational coherence, ideological vitality, and mass social support. Understanding why this happened, and what it means for Brazilian democracy, carries implications that extend far beyond the country's borders. The article under examination, published in the Journal of Politics in Latin America, takes up precisely this challenge, asking not merely how Bolsonaro rose to power but how his ideological project survived the ballot box. At a moment when development institutions, civil society organizations, and democratic governance frameworks are all grappling with the structural conditions that produce and sustain illiberalism, this scholarship arrives with considerable urgency.
The central analytical contribution of the study lies in its insistence that Bolsonarismo must be understood as an alignment — a composite political formation — rather than a purely personalist phenomenon. This distinction is theoretically significant. Personalism, as a concept in Latin American politics, would predict that the movement's fortunes are inseparable from those of its figurehead; once the leader is removed from power, the coalition dissipates. The article argues instead that something more durable has been constructed in Brazil: an ideological bloc that fuses evangelical Protestant networks, agrarian elites, security sector constituencies, and a broadly anxious lower-middle class that perceives itself as culturally and economically threatened by both the progressive left and the cosmopolitan establishment. Each of these constituent elements brings its own institutional infrastructure, its own media ecosystem, and its own grievance narrative. The result is a political alignment capable of persisting through electoral setbacks precisely because it does not depend on any single node for its cohesion. What Bolsonaro's presidency accomplished, in this reading, was less the exercise of state power and more the crystallization of a pre-existing social and cultural sediment into recognizable political form.
The Brazilian trajectory finds clear parallels in broader regional and global patterns, and situating it comparatively deepens the analysis considerably. Across Latin America, the post-Pink Tide period produced not a simple restoration of technocratic centrism but a more volatile oscillation, with right-wing mobilizations in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and El Salvador each reflecting the particular texture of local discontents while drawing on a transnational repertoire of anti-establishment grievance politics. Globally, the literature on democratic backsliding has shifted its emphasis from sudden authoritarian ruptures — coups, emergency decrees — toward what scholars increasingly describe as executive aggrandizement and competitive authoritarianism: processes in which institutional erosion occurs incrementally, through the capture of courts, electoral bodies, and media regulatory frameworks. Bolsonaro's four-year presidency displayed this template with unusual clarity, and the question of what consolidates after such a period is not merely academic. For development practitioners working within the ODA framework, far-right alignment politics presents a specific and underappreciated challenge. Civil society organizations that serve as implementation partners for development programs frequently depend on legal and political environments that guarantee freedom of association, independent oversight, and pluralist public discourse. When those environments are degraded — not abruptly but gradually, through a sustained campaign of institutional pressure — the downstream effects on aid effectiveness and accountability mechanisms can be severe, even if they are difficult to attribute causally in standard evaluation frameworks.
The policy implications of this scholarship are therefore multiple. For democratic governance programs, the article's finding that Bolsonarismo survived 2022 as an organized alignment rather than dissipating into nostalgia suggests that restorative frameworks — the idea that winning an election against a far-right incumbent effectively ends the threat — are analytically insufficient and operationally dangerous. Institutions like the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court, civil society watchdog organizations, and federally funded cultural and educational programs all came under sustained pressure during the Bolsonaro years. Lula's return to the presidency has partially reversed some of these pressures, but the underlying social coalition that produced Bolsonarismo has not been dissolved; it has, if anything, been further energized by a narrative of victimhood and elite conspiracy. For international donors and ODA-engaged institutions operating in Brazil and analogous contexts, this means that civil society support programming must account not only for legal restrictions on NGO activity — which remain the standard diagnostic framework — but also for the more diffuse and harder-to-measure dynamics by which social trust in independent civil society erodes when a large and politically organized segment of the population has been successfully persuaded that such organizations are instruments of ideological subversion rather than public goods.
Looking forward, the research agenda that this article opens is as important as its immediate findings. Several questions remain underexplored. First, the generational dimension of far-right alignment deserves sustained empirical attention: whether younger Brazilians who came of political age during the Bolsonaro years carry its ideological imprint as a durable identity or are susceptible to political reorientation will significantly shape the medium-term trajectory of Brazilian democracy. Second, the role of digital infrastructure — particularly WhatsApp networks, YouTube channels, and the dense ecosystem of Bolsonarista influencers — in sustaining alignment cohesion without a president in office represents a relatively novel phenomenon that existing models of political party organization do not capture well. Third, and perhaps most consequentially for the field of development studies, the interaction between macroeconomic vulnerability and authoritarian alignment politics remains theoretically underdeveloped. Brazil's combination of persistent structural inequality, inflationary pressure on urban working-class households, and the highly mediated visibility of elite consumption created conditions that Bolsonarismo was uniquely positioned to exploit. Whether Lula's center-left coalition can deliver sufficiently tangible material improvements while simultaneously rebuilding institutional trust — and whether it can do so faster than the opposing alignment reconsolidates its narrative — is a genuinely open question. Scholars, practitioners, and policymakers who engage seriously with this article's framework will be better equipped to track what comes next, and to understand that what is at stake in Brazil's political contest is not merely the fate of one administration but the shape of democratic possibility in one of the hemisphere's most consequential societies.