Abstract

GIRELLI, Luciana Silvestre  and  MACHADO, Igor Suzano. Between Antagonisms and Fantasies: The Political Identification of Working-Class Students with Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 and 2022 Brazilian Presidential Elections. rev.estud.soc. [online]. 2025, n.94, pp.145-162.  Epub Oct 26, 2025. ISSN 0123-885X.  https://doi.org/10.7440/res94.2025.08.

This article examines the political identification of students enrolled in technical courses linked to secondary education, within the youth and adult education track, with Jair Messias Bolsonaro during the 2018 and 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. The study seeks to explain how members of the lower classes-marked by interrupted schooling and precarious labor conditions-came to support a far-right candidate. Data were collected in 2022 and 2023 through individual non-directive and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and observations of conversations on messaging applications. The analysis adopts the discourse theory of the Essex School as its theoretical and methodological framework. Drawing on the categories of political identification, antagonism, and fantasy, the findings indicate that students were mobilized by moral agendas-particularly the defense of the family-constructed antagonistically around the struggle against a common enemy: the Workers’ Party (PT) and the political left. From an ideological, or “fantasmatic,” perspective, students were incorporated into this system of belief through the mobilization of powerful emotions such as fear, frustration, and resentment, fueled in part by their exclusion from certain social inclusion policies of PT governments. In terms of originality, the article demonstrates how these working-class actors, through the lens of their everyday experiences, ascribed meaning to the Brazilian far-right project and shows how the digital strategy of disintermediation between leader and people was central to the consolidation of Bolsonarismo within this group.

Keywords : antagonism; fantasy; Jair Bolsonaro; political identification; presidential elections; Proeja.

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