Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-02
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between far-right governance and social protection systems has emerged as one of the most consequential questions in contemporary comparative politics. Across Latin America and beyond, the rise of populist right-wing administrations has generated intense debate about whether such governments dismantle welfare states ideologically opposed to their stated preferences, or whether political constraints, institutional inertia, and electoral calculations produce something more ambiguous — a drift rather than a demolition. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers one of the most instructive and contested cases for examining this question. The country entered the Bolsonaro era with Bolsa Família, one of the most celebrated conditional cash transfer programs in development history, and exited it with a nominally successor program called Auxílio Brasil. Whether that transformation constitutes a genuine rupture or a calculated political maneuver wrapped in ideological branding is precisely the kind of question that demands rigorous scholarly attention, and it is the analytical center of this article published in Latin American Perspectives.
Bolsa Família was never simply a welfare program. By the time Bolsonaro took office in January 2019, it had become a symbol of the Workers' Party's (PT) developmental model — a flagship instrument of redistribution that had lifted tens of millions of Brazilians out of extreme poverty and earned international recognition as a template for social protection in the Global South. The program's architecture, combining means-tested cash transfers with conditionalities linked to school attendance and healthcare visits, reflected a particular vision of the state's role in mediating social risk and enabling human capital formation. For Bolsonaro and his ideological allies, Bolsa Família carried the taint of Lula-era politics. The expectation among many observers was that the administration would move aggressively to reduce or restructure the program in line with its embrace of economic liberalism and its hostility to what it characterized as a "culture of dependency." What emerged instead was considerably more complicated. The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in 2020 and forced the government's hand, compelling even an administration philosophically resistant to expanded social spending to authorize the Auxílio Emergencial, a temporary emergency transfer that reached over 65 million Brazilians and was, at its peak, larger and more generous than Bolsa Família itself. The pandemic thus became an unintended stress test of far-right social policy, revealing the political impossibility of welfare retrenchment during an acute economic and public health crisis.
The article's central contribution is its careful distinction between dismantling and drifting as two analytically distinct modes of policy change. Dismantling implies intentional, deliberate destruction — the legislative rollback, administrative underfunding, or outright abolition of existing programs. Drifting, by contrast, refers to a more insidious process by which programs erode not through direct attack but through neglect, rebranding, and the gradual alteration of their institutional logic. The transformation of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil is best understood as a case of drift with strategic rebranding. The Bolsonaro administration did not eliminate the program; it reconstituted it under a new name, modified some eligibility thresholds, expanded the nominal value of transfers in the lead-up to the 2022 electoral cycle, and stripped away some of the institutional scaffolding — particularly around conditionality enforcement and interministerial coordination — that had given Bolsa Família its distinctive character. The result was a program that looked superficially more generous but was structurally weaker, more nakedly clientelistic, and less embedded in the social protection architecture that had made the original program effective. This is a crucial distinction for analysts of social policy under far-right governments, as it suggests that the absence of visible dismantling should not be mistaken for ideological moderation or institutional continuity.
This case speaks to broader dynamics that scholars of ODA and social development have been tracking across the Global South. The phenomenon of conditional cash transfers as a policy technology has always carried within it a tension between developmental intent and political instrumentalization. Programs like Bolsa Família were designed to be legible, measurable, and politically defensible — qualities that made them attractive to international donors and multilateral institutions but also made them highly susceptible to electoral manipulation. The Bolsonaro administration's pre-election expansion of Auxílio Brasil in 2022, funded through creative constitutional maneuvering that circumvented the fiscal responsibility frameworks the administration itself had championed, illustrates how social protection programs can be simultaneously undermined institutionally and inflated politically. For development practitioners and researchers who work on program design and conditionality, this presents a sobering lesson: the technical architecture of a program, however carefully constructed, offers limited protection against political actors willing to exploit its visibility while degrading its integrity. The Brazilian experience also raises questions about the role of international actors — the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and bilateral donors who had long held Bolsa Família as a model — in either reinforcing or contesting these transformations. The relative silence of the development community during the Auxílio Brasil rebranding exercise warrants critical reflection.
The policy implications of this analysis are significant, both for Brazil's ongoing social protection trajectory and for the comparative study of welfare states under right-wing populism. With Lula's return to power in January 2023 and the restoration of the program under the Bolsa Família name with an expanded benefit ceiling, the question of institutional memory and program resilience becomes urgent. Can a program whose conditionality infrastructure was allowed to degrade, whose interministerial governance mechanisms were weakened, and whose public image was altered through years of rebranding simply be restored by renaming it again? The evidence from comparable cases — including social program transformations under right-wing governments in Argentina, Hungary, and the Philippines — suggests that drift-induced institutional damage is considerably harder to reverse than it is to identify. Monitoring and evaluation systems, trained social workers, local-level bureaucratic capacity, and the political coalitions that sustain program legitimacy are not easily rebuilt. For researchers, this underscores the importance of moving beyond output metrics — number of beneficiaries, transfer amounts — to examine the institutional and governance dimensions of social programs, which are precisely the dimensions most vulnerable to drift.
Looking forward, the Brazilian case offers a necessary corrective to two competing but equally insufficient narratives about far-right governance and social policy. The first narrative, common in progressive advocacy circles, holds that right-wing populists inevitably destroy welfare states in service of elite economic interests. The second, increasingly fashionable in comparative politics literature, argues that populist governments of all stripes tend toward welfare chauvinism and social spending expansion rather than retrenchment. Brazil under Bolsonaro fits neither cleanly. What it illustrates is a more context-dependent, electorally sensitive, and institutionally consequential pattern: the strategic drift of social programs, which preserves their political utility while eroding their developmental substance. For the ODA community and for scholars of civil society and social policy in Latin America, this demands more granular attention to the institutional texture of programs — not just what is spent, but how, through what mechanisms, and with what governance accountability. As climate shocks, democratic backsliding, and geopolitical turbulence continue to reshape the conditions under which social protection systems operate, the lessons from Brazil's experiment with Auxílio Brasil will remain relevant far beyond the Southern Cone.