Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-05
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The intersection of far-right political governance and social protection policy has become one of the most consequential analytical questions in contemporary development studies. As populist and nationalist movements have gained executive power across Latin America, Eastern Europe, and beyond, scholars and practitioners alike have been forced to revisit foundational assumptions about the durability of social policy institutions, the relationship between ideological commitment and bureaucratic path dependency, and the capacity of welfare programs to outlast the administrations that once opposed them. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers perhaps the most structurally significant case study in this regard: a government that came to power with explicit hostility toward the social legacy of the Workers' Party (PT), confronted a pandemic of historic proportions, and ultimately reshaped — rather than razed — the country's flagship conditional cash transfer program. The article published in Latin American Perspectives by Amâncio Jorge Silva Nunes de Oliveira and colleagues provides a rigorous examination of how this transformation unfolded, under what political logics it operated, and what it reveals about the nature of far-right governance in middle-income democracies.
The central analytical contribution of the article lies in its framing of the question as one of "dismantling or drifting" — a distinction that carries considerable theoretical weight. Dismantling implies a deliberate, ideologically motivated effort to reduce the scope and reach of a social program, consistent with neoliberal retrenchment narratives that have shaped much of the comparative welfare state literature. Drifting, by contrast, refers to a process by which institutional change occurs not through explicit reform but through inaction, rebranding, and the gradual erosion of program fidelity — what scholars in the tradition of Jacob Hacker have called "policy drift." The Bolsonaro government's transformation of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil fits neither category cleanly, and therein lies the analytical richness of the case. The COVID-19 crisis introduced an extraordinary emergency that compelled the administration to dramatically expand cash transfers through the Auxílio Emergencial program, a de facto acknowledgment that targeted income support was both politically necessary and administratively feasible. Yet this expansion was temporally bounded and ultimately served as political cover for a structural rebranding of Bolsa Família under a new name, with modified eligibility criteria and benefit structures, timed conspicuously to coincide with the 2022 electoral campaign.
What the article reveals about Brazilian social policy under far-right governance is deeply relevant to the broader Latin American regional context. Brazil's Bolsa Família, inaugurated under President Lula in 2003 and expanded under Dilma Rousseff, had become the archetypal example of a conditional cash transfer program and a reference point for social protection design across the Global South. Its association with the PT gave it a partisan identity that made it a symbolic target for Bolsonarismo's culture-war politics. Yet the program's administrative depth, its integration into municipal infrastructure, and its demonstrated effectiveness in reducing extreme poverty created a powerful path dependency that even an ideologically hostile government could not easily overcome. The renaming to Auxílio Brasil was, in this reading, less a policy innovation than a political maneuver — an attempt to capture the electoral benefits of social spending while symbolically erasing the PT's legacy. This dynamic is not unique to Brazil. In Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, governments across the ideological spectrum have confronted the tension between programmatic commitments to roll back redistributive policies and the electoral costs of actually doing so, particularly in contexts of high poverty and inequality.
The policy implications of this analysis extend well beyond Brazil's borders. For international development organizations — including bilateral donors, multilateral institutions, and civil society actors engaged in social protection advocacy — the case raises urgent questions about the conditionality of progress in poverty reduction. If flagship programs can be nominally preserved while being substantively hollowed out through administrative neglect, targeting shifts, or benefit erosion, then the metrics by which the international community assesses social policy performance require significant revision. Coverage rates and benefit levels reported in administrative data may mask qualitative deterioration in program reach and adequacy. Moreover, the Bolsonaro case illustrates how electoral cycles interact with social policy timing in ways that complicate the standard donor logic of "scaling what works." When a government expands cash transfers not out of developmental conviction but out of electoral calculation, the sustainability of that expansion beyond the electoral moment becomes deeply uncertain — as the subsequent Lula administration's efforts to reconstitute Bolsa Família under its original branding have confirmed. For researchers working in the tradition of ODA effectiveness and social protection systems strengthening, this suggests the need for more granular, politically-informed assessments of program continuity and fragility.
Looking forward, the Brazilian experience under Bolsonaro and its aftermath will likely become a canonical reference case for scholars studying the relationship between democratic backsliding, social policy, and institutional resilience. The article's findings suggest that far-right governments in middle-income democracies are neither straightforwardly neoliberal nor simply populist in their social policy orientation: they are strategic actors who navigate the tension between ideological antipathy toward redistributive programs and the electoral arithmetic of large beneficiary populations. This has significant implications for how civil society organizations and development practitioners engage with government counterparts in politically volatile contexts. Programs that are deeply embedded in local administrative systems and that enjoy broad popular legitimacy are not immune to transformation under hostile governments, but they possess a form of institutional resilience that more recently established programs lack. The challenge for the international research and policy community is to better theorize and measure this resilience — to develop frameworks that can distinguish between nominal program continuity and substantive policy fidelity — so that lessons from Brazil's turbulent social policy decade can be translated into actionable guidance for the next generation of social protection architects across the Global South.