The prospect Jair Bolsonaro as president of Latin America’s largest country has put Brazil under a global spotlight.

A former army captain, Bolsonaro has lauded the use of torture and murder under Brazil’s military dictatorship, and made appalling public statements about gay people and women. Yet in spite of this – or perhaps because of it – he obtained 46 percent, or over 49 million votes, in the first round of voting.

Many analysts have attributed his sharp rise to the corruption scandals involving Brazil’s state oil firm, Petrobras, and the Odebrecht construction company. Brazilians flooded the streets as information emerged about the depth and scope of the debacle, which implicated all of the country’s major parties including Bolsonaro’s own Social Liberal Party.

However, with the help of a concerted media campaign, much of the blame for the scandal was attributed to the country’s political Left, especially the Workers Party (PT). The large, but highly selective, “anti-corruption” demonstrations which followed therefore buttressed the right-wing campaign to impeach then-president Dilma Rousseff and taint the PT.

Brazil isn’t the only Latin American country to veer right in recent years. “I do not know if the category of fascism is the most adequate to understand this phenomena,” said Dr. Atilio A. Boron, sociologist and professor of Latin American History at Argentina’s Universidad De Avellaneda. Boron has studied the history of the far right in Latin America, including the brutal military dictatorships that governed much of the region throughout the 1970s and 1980s and the far-right paramilitary outfits in Colombia and Central America.

While these regimes and groups shared certain characteristics with the fascism of Germany, Italy and Spain, Boron says there were other significant differences, including the absence of a mass movement. For Boron, these discrepancies also apply for current right-wing movements in Latin America, including Bolsonaro’s.

“I think they are clearly reactionary characters, but fascism is a very special form of reaction. It implies for example a process of organizing and mobilizing the middle strata, which is not the case for Bolsonaro, (Argentine President Mauricio) Macri or (Ivan) Duque of Colombia,” Boron said.

“I think Bolsonaro is a miserable character who unfortunately [embodies] the worst of aspects Latin American politics in recent times, so it is convenient to use the term fascist in this case, but it should be understood that the term goes beyond [his statements].”

Sabrina Fernandes, a sociologist and researcher at the University of Brasília, sees the Bolsonaro camp as having already reached this middle strata. Fernandes, producer of left-wing YouTube channel TeseOnze, says the Right was able to make significant inroads among the popular classes in the aftermath of the Lava Jato ordeal.

“The far-right movement in Brazil mobilized the middle class more than anything, especially around impeachment of Dilma Rousseff,” said Fernandes. The impeachment process, she said, was “mostly white middle and white upper-class,” but also managed to mobilize sectors of the working and lower-classes. The sheer size of the demonstrations against corruption in the country, as well as their heavy anti-Left and anti-PT tone, attest to that.