Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-03
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The global resurgence of far-right populism over the past decade has generated intense scholarly debate over how governments ideologically hostile to redistributive social policy actually behave when they encounter the institutional legacies of welfare programs embedded in democratic societies. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) offers one of the most instructive and analytically rich cases for examining this question, not least because the country inherited from successive Workers' Party (PT) administrations one of the most internationally celebrated conditional cash transfer programs in the developing world — Bolsa Família. The intersection of a global pandemic, a fragile democratic order, and a president openly contemptuous of progressive social policy produced a paradox that this article in Latin American Perspectives takes as its central problem: rather than dismantling Bolsa Família outright, the Bolsonaro government ultimately expanded cash transfers and rebranded the program, raising fundamental questions about the political durability of redistributive institutions and the forms that welfare state erosion can take when outright abolition is politically impossible.
The article's framing around the binary of "dismantling" versus "drifting" draws on a productive strand of comparative welfare state literature that distinguishes between active retrenchment — in which governments make explicit legislative cuts to social programs — and more gradual processes of institutional drift, layering, or conversion, through which the underlying logic or targeting of a program is quietly altered without formal abolition. Bolsonaro's trajectory with regard to social protection fits uneasily into the first category. Throughout his campaign, he expressed hostility to the PT's social legacy, but once in office the political calculus proved more complicated. Bolsa Família enjoyed overwhelming popular support across Brazil's lower-income regions — precisely the constituencies that any government hoping to survive electorally needed to court. The COVID-19 pandemic, which struck Brazil with devastating force beginning in early 2020, compounded this dilemma by generating mass unemployment and a sharp contraction in household income that could not plausibly be addressed without emergency public transfers. The result was the Auxílio Emergencial, a remarkably large emergency cash transfer that at its peak reached approximately 68 million Brazilians and temporarily lifted millions above the poverty line — a scope that arguably exceeded anything the PT had delivered. The Bolsonaro administration found itself, almost inadvertently, administering the largest social protection intervention in Brazilian history.
What this article appears to argue, based on close analysis of the policy sequence, is that the transition from Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil in late 2021 should not be read as a simple continuation or improvement of the legacy program, but rather as a politically motivated conversion that subtly reshaped the program's institutional character. Auxílio Brasil increased nominal benefit levels — a move the Bolsonaro government advertised aggressively ahead of the 2022 presidential election — but did so in ways that raised serious questions about fiscal sustainability, conditionality enforcement, and the long-term integrity of the targeting architecture that had made Bolsa Família effective. Analysts noted that the program's expansion was financed partly through fiscal maneuvers that circumvented Brazil's constitutional spending ceiling, suggesting that the welfare commitment was subordinated to electoral imperatives rather than grounded in a coherent social protection philosophy. The renaming itself carried symbolic weight: erasing "Bolsa Família" from the public register was an act of political appropriation, attempting to strip the PT of its most enduring policy legacy while claiming the redistributive benefits for Bolsonaro's own populist identity.
These dynamics connect to broader patterns visible across Latin America and beyond, where the relationship between right-wing populism and social policy has defied simple predictions of retrenchment. In countries such as Hungary, Poland, and the Philippines, ostensibly conservative or nationalist governments have expanded certain categories of social transfer — particularly universal or near-universal cash benefits — precisely because such programs build political loyalty and are difficult for opposition forces to attack without appearing punitive toward vulnerable populations. The Latin American literature on this phenomenon has increasingly emphasized what scholars call "right-wing social populism," a configuration in which governments use redistributive instruments not to build long-term human capital or address structural inequality, but to generate short-term political dependency and electoral gratitude. Brazil under Bolsonaro fits this model with uncomfortable precision. The analytical challenge, which this article engages seriously, is to distinguish between the form of a social program — its visibility, its benefit levels, its reach — and its substance: the institutional commitments, administrative capacity, and policy philosophy that determine whether a program actually delivers sustained welfare improvements over time. Auxílio Brasil scored more impressively on the former than the latter.
For researchers and practitioners working in the field of ODA and development policy, the Brazilian case carries important methodological and normative implications. International development institutions, including the World Bank and various bilateral donors, have long promoted conditional cash transfer programs as a template for poverty reduction in lower-middle-income countries, often pointing to Bolsa Família as the paradigmatic success story. The Bolsonaro episode complicates this narrative by demonstrating that even technically well-designed programs can be instrumentalized and hollowed out by governments that lack commitment to their underlying welfare rationale. This matters for program design in contexts where political instability is anticipated: technical quality is insufficient protection against institutional drift if governance frameworks do not build in independent monitoring, civil society oversight, and insulation from electoral manipulation. The case also raises important questions for comparative welfare state theory about how to measure the health of a social program when quantitative indicators such as coverage and benefit levels may be temporarily inflated for political reasons while the program's structural foundations are quietly degraded.
Looking forward, the article's findings are particularly timely given that Brazil under Lula's returned government has moved to reconstitute the Bolsa Família brand and restore elements of the program's original conditionality and targeting architecture. This restoration process is itself instructive: it suggests that institutional drift is not irreversible, but that reversing it requires significant political capital and administrative effort, and that the damage done during a period of populist instrumentalization — to the cadasters, the monitoring systems, the fiscal frameworks — can outlast the government that caused it. For scholars of far-right governance and social policy, Brazil stands as a reminder that the most consequential forms of welfare state erosion may not announce themselves through dramatic cuts, but through the slower, quieter transformation of what programs mean, who controls them, and what political logic they serve. Understanding this distinction is essential not only for interpreting Brazil's democratic experience but for anticipating how social policy institutions will fare in the many other democracies where far-right forces have either taken power or are positioned to do so in the years ahead.