Radical Right-Wing Populism (RWP) is a phenomenon that has been introduced previously in Latin America. In periods of economic crisis, the fight against inflation was another hallmark of right-wing populist appeals. Nevertheless, nativism, the core feature of RRP, was largely missing in earlier cases of RWP in Latin America. Nonetheless, Bolsonaro is as much a symptom of a broader trend as he is a consequence of recent Brazilian history.
Looking at Latin America, the criterion to define populism needs to be revised. Nativism and ethnopluralism seem out of place in a region where the concept of a homogenous nation-state never took hold and where mestizaje is a cultural ideal. This is not to say that nativism has to be dropped as a definitional criterion for the Latin American far-right. There are notable ideological overlaps with the European and North American New Right, for example, concerning immigration, which is a controversial issue in South America. There are also offenses against ethnic and cultural minorities, and nationalist rhetoric is pervasive.
The emergence of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) from the suburbs of São Paulo, its institutionalization, and its later rise to the presidential office in 2002 not only turned traditional Brazilian politics on its head, but it also spurred a flood of research on the phenomenon, commonly referred to as PTlogia in Brazil. An annotated bibliography on the PT from 2013 covers more than 400 pages (Metidieri Menegozzo 2013) and the flow of publications on the party has since continued.