by Far-right parties in the Global North have expanded their relevancy over the last 20 years, most recently achieving success in the United States following the reelection of Donald Trump. The rise of these movements has led scholars to increasingly research the ideas and material grievances driving far-right movements. In the Global South, too, the far-right has seen remarkable results, with the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President of Brazil in 2018 the most prominent example, whose time in office weakened the country’s welfare systems, environmental regulations and human rights protections.
Bolsonaro’s presidency ended with a mob of his supporters attacking several federal government buildings in Brazil’s capital, Brasilia, on 8 January 2023, seeking to overthrow the newly elected Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva. In 2024, federal police accused Bolsonaro and 36 people of also planning a coup to keep him in power. The Brazilian Supreme Court ruled in April 2025 that he should stand trial. Bolsonaro has been barred from running for office until 2030 but has said he will fight the ban to run for a second term in 2026.
Understanding the Religious Aspects of Brazil’s New Right Movement
In a forthcoming research paper, Dr Georg Walter Wink, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies/Latin America at University of Copenhagen, analysed two dystopian novels by Brazilian journalist and political scientist Bernardo Kucinski. A retired professor at the University of São Paulo, Kucinski is closely aligned with the New Right’s main rival, the Workers’ Party (PT), even serving as an adviser to Lula during his first term as president (2002–2006).
Kucinski’s books are called The New Order (A nova ordem) and The Collapse of the New Order (O colapso da nova ordem), published in 2019 and 2022, respectively. They narrate the successful implementation and subsequent overthrow in Brazil of a far-right, totalitarian, hyper-capitalist regime under the command of the military, which aims to control every aspect of citizens’ lives, including inventing microchips to control minds.
Dr Wink, who is also the coordinator of ILAS – Iberian and Latin American Studies Forum and head of the Centre for the Study of Global Nationalisms (CSGN), is in his paper critical of Kucinski’s characterisation of the Brazilian Right—the New Right—because it overlooks the movement’s distinct anti-modernist features. “We should not portray the far right [in Brazil] as soldiers torturing and everything dark and brainwashing through computer controlled manipulation because the far right hates exactly that. Their utopia is a religious, well-ordered, bright, private, very local community,” he told DDRN in a recent interview.
Some recent scholarship by Ole Jakob Løland has noted the theological foundations of the electoral coalition that saw Bolsonaro elected. The 2018 election is the first time that Brazil’s Catholic upper clergy and evangelical lower classes have endorsed the same candidate for president, the first through discrete elite lobbying, the second through voting power. This showed the consolidation of different religious communities into a powerful political majority, which aligns with the neoliberal political right and neoconservative groups. Dr Wink agrees, saying his motivation for writing his research paper was to explain that the “far right in Brazil aims at order and liberty. Order in the private space, preserving certain values. On the other hand, the liberty dimension means opposition to all kinds of state control . . . It is far from what Kucinski describes [in his novels] as a totalitarian control society.” It is crucial to understand the dynamics of the New Right movement for those who wish to stop its rise and defeat it, he adds.
Economic Grievances
These ideological influences become even more persuasive in times of economic insecurity. A study by economists Laura Barros and Manuel Santos Silva found that Bolsonaro’s rhetoric based on masculine stereotypes and authoritarianism increased in popularity among Brazilian men who experienced a relative decline in economic status. One could also argue that the Workers’ Party (PT) has not done enough to disrupt the dominance of economic and political structures unfavourable to most Brazilians despite controlling the federal government between 2003 and 2016.
“What makes people not believe in the progressive forces in Brazil is probably precisely that social reformism is very timid. For example, they never dealt with the question which is probably the main cause of inequality in Brazil—the tax system. There’s one detail perfectly characterising Brazilian inequality: the average salary is very different from the median salary,” Dr Wink says. Brazil is one of the world’s most unequal countries, with levels comparable to Southern Africa, the most unequal region globally.
Historical Roots
In Brazil: Land of the Past, published in 2021, Dr Wink analyses the origins of the ideas underpinning the New Right. The book’s thesis is that Brazilian conservative thought revolves around defending the country’s “natural order”, as constituted when Brazil gained independence in 1822 as a monarchical empire. The far right, argues Dr Wink, emerged as a reaction to a military coup overthrowing the monarchy in 1889 to found a republic. This process differs from the other Hispano-American colonies—such as Argentina and Colombia—which became republics at independence.
Brazil’s Armed Forces have a history of ousting civilian governments, most recently in 1964, when the military established a dictatorship lasting until 1985. The military is, however, not the driving political force of either the Old or New Right: “The military is not in the centre. They are those who carry out ideas. Behind the military, you have a very conservative elite in Brazil, which, of course, defends with whatever means its inherited privilege from the colonial times,” Dr Wink posits.
The country’s economic inequality has deep roots. For instance, non-white Brazilians are disadvantaged by widespread systemic racism, a 2024 report from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights found. Moreover, research shows that contemporary land distribution in Brazil is partly inherited from the colonial era.
How the New Right in Brazil Can Inform Similar Movements Elsewhere
Far from simply being a mirror of developments in the Global North, conservative political forces in countries like Brazil have a distinct history and features. “[These movements] have their own ideas and, above all, their own means of political mobilisation. We can learn a lot from WhatsApp use in Brazil, for example. We can learn a lot from state-controlled media propaganda in China. But I think the key lesson to learn from the New Right in the Global South is the importance of desecularisation,” Dr Wink explains.
He is currently heading a research project at the Centre for the Study of Global Nationalisms investigating how the far right across the World uses notions of tradition and spiritualism to oppose Western ideas of modernity. The project, part of HUM:Global Flagship Initiatives, was launched in 2024.
“I think in Europe, and especially northern Europe, we are in that bubble to think that the world is secularised, and it never has been the case. In the Global South, you have many people strongly believing in the desire for spirituality, religion and such things. The New Right in the Global South have learned how to surf on that wave of desecularisation,” Dr Wink says.
Adrian Ganic is a M.Sc., THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONIMCS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE and a DDRN CORRESPONDENT
