The Far Right in Latin America, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Carlos Meléndez, Talita Tanscheit and Lisa Zanotti, 2026, Cambridge University Press
As the last left-wing dominoes in democratic Latin America wobble before the seemingly unstoppable march of the far-right, there seems no better time for political scientists to identify common factors to explain this alarming political trend.
Are we witnessing a left-right pendulum swing away from liberal democracy merely to more illiberal styles of constitutional rule, or the end of democracy itself as a populist radical right morphs into an anti-democratic extreme right?
The Far Right in Latin America is an excellent and long overdue place to start answering this question, setting out to explore the phenomenon through an explicitly regional and comparative lens focused on identifying key drivers of the rightward turn.
Brazil, where Flávio Bolsonaro is on the verge of unseating the incumbent president Lula da Silva, is among case studies that help to illustrate why left-wing forces are under siege despite having been the initial beneficiaries, and in many ways architects, of democratisation.
A key reason for why Brazilian politics may be emblematic of what is happening elsewhere in Latin America has been precisely the left’s inclusionary agenda that democracy enabled, incorporating groups hitherto excluded from established hierarchies.
As editor Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser suggests in the introduction, and the central argument of this collection, Latin America’s inclusionary turn has carried the potential to generate a counterreaction, particularly in the sociocultural domain.
Rovira argues: “… the rise of the far right in Latin America represents a reactionary response to the progress made by democratic regimes in integrating historically marginalised groups.
“Despite various shortcomings, Latin American democracies have gradually weakened the control of dominant groups over majority–minority relations and their status.
“This is particularly evident in countries that experienced a leftward shift during the 2000s, where left-of-centre governments implemented a range of socioeconomic and sociocultural reforms.”
As the introduction notes, pressing questions about how we explain the rapid and uneven rise of the far right across Latin America and the similarities and differences of these insurgent movements have remained largely unanswered.
There are two main reasons for this: far-right forces are relatively new in Latin America, meaning there has been little comparative research on them; and despite growing academic interest in the far right, most research has focused predominantly on Europe and the US.
This collection aims to address these shortcomings with a cross-national and cross-regional comparative perspective, while sketching out the best way to sow the seeds of systematic, practical future study in this fertile academic territory.
Importantly, the editors argue that the concepts developed to study the far right in Europe and beyond should be applied to the Latin American context with caution, and hint at the difficulties of developing a general theoretical model applicable to different places anyway.
One reason for this is that in Europe a key factor driving the rise of the far-right has been immigration, whereas outside the region populist radical-right forces have not had available targets of “alien” immigrants or Muslim populations.
By contrast, scholarship suggests, in societies shaped by settler colonialism, populist radical-right actors often advance a “mono-culturalist” view advocating the dominance of one nation that can reject the coexistence of diverse national or ethno-racial identities.
Scholars focusing on the mobilisation of right-wing actors in Latin America have often coincided on the argument that they represent a new political project aimed at limiting and reversing gains made by historically marginalised groups distinguished, for example, by gender, sexuality, ethnicity and racial identity.
Just as the inclusionary turn experienced at the beginning of the century reflected a new spirit of democracy and combined with a favourable international environment promoting liberal values to create unprecedented opportunities for the incorporation of historically ignored groups, the far-right in its many variants harks back to the status quo ante.
Rovira writes: “In other words, the very success of these cumulative inclusionary efforts has sown the seeds for a backlash – one that is now being articulated by the far right.
“Because inclusionary reforms tend to produce, or at least generate the perception of, ‘winners and losers’, they are particularly prone to triggering opposition.”
Culture is clearly not the only explanatory factor here but can at least draw attention to other indicators that might at first sight seem applicable but do not necessarily stand the test of empirical analysis.
The “losers of modernisation” thesis, for example, suggests far-right support might originate among social groups unable to adapt to ongoing economic transformations.
However, as Rovira notes, indicators such as deprivation and unemployment do not consistently associate with far-right support in Latin America, limiting their explanatory power.
Other factors may also be driving changes in attitudes, such as support for free-market policies, environmental concerns, law-and-order preferences, moral conservatism or xenophobia.
While the book aims to begin the systematic study of such variables, its point of departure is that at a more abstract level a broader argument can be applied to the Latin American context that begins with the idea that the far right represents a radical reaction against processes of social change.
In his chapter on Brazil as just one case study in this collection, Lucio Rennó points out that Jair Bolsonaro, who established himself against the odds as an outsider during a period of economic and political crisis, fits easily into the characterisation of the far right with a special emphasis on sociocultural factors.
We can assume that, despite a softening of the rhetoric, his son Flávio is merely a mouthpiece for his jailed father, who was the progenitor of the latter’s political career and remains in ideological control.
Rennó writes: “[Jair] Bolsonaro proposes a backlash against progressive cultural positions; a liberal economic agenda; is strongly against affirmative action for minorities groups and favourable to reducing state intervention in the economy; zero tolerance towards crime and delinquency, adopting a mano dura approach to law and order.”
The contributor explores these positions in detail in an effort to position Jair Bolsonaro on a typology of far-right classifications from radical-right populist to extreme right.
This is of great importance right now, not only for Brazil but for Latin America as a whole should Flávio Bolsonaro come to power on his father’s coat-tails.
That is because what distinguishes these categories is support for democracy: while radical-right populism is against liberal democracy, the extreme right is opposed to democracy per se. As a country that has lived under dictatorships in the past, it is simply not a stretch of the imagination to fear this occurring once again.
Rennó writes: “Brazil seems like a case in which a radical populist mutated into an anti-democratic extremist … populists instrumentalise democracy, using it to their benefit and then quickly shifting to undermine the regime when it is no longer useful for them.
“The line between delegitimising democracy into its illiberal form and the actual defence of authoritarianism is a very thin one.
“Hence, we might want to reconsider the difference between radical populists and authoritarian extremists. Certainly, in the case of Brazil, it is difficult to tell where one starts and the other begins.”
The country will have to remain vigilant in the years to come, the contributor points out.
Rennó concludes: “The case of Bolsonaro in Brazil indicates the very thin line that distinguishes, on one hand, the effort of delegitimising liberal democracy and pushing it into illiberal forms and the open defence of authoritarianism and the overturn of the democratic regime.”
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Categories: Central America, South America