Brazil’s far-right Bolsonarista candidates from Brazil’s Liberal Party (PL) hold 76 seats in the upper house and comprehensive 99 seats in Brazil’s lower house – the highest number of elected officials achieved by one single party in the last presidential elections. For women representation in Brazil, while numbers have been historically very low, they have just had their best electoral performance. Female candidates secured 18 percent of congressional seats, with numbers significantly increasing in Brazil’s lower house, but shrinking in the upper house. Although women’s seats in congress are at high, representation still lags in comparison to the global average. In recent years, Michelle Bolsonaro, the wife of former far-right president Jair Messias Bolsonaro, is growing in popularity among ultra-conservative women in Brazil. Drawing from news articles, social media posts and political speeches and with the use of NVivo coding, this paper analyses perceptions towards women inside Bolsonarism, current contradictions inside the far-right movement, and how feminist views towards women’s agency are reinterpreted by women inside Brazil’s far-right.
