Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-07
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between far-right populist governance and social protection systems has emerged as one of the defining tensions in contemporary political economy. Across Latin America and beyond, the rise of right-wing nationalist governments elected on platforms of fiscal austerity, anti-statism, and political polarization has raised urgent questions about the fate of redistributive welfare architecture built during previous progressive cycles. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro provided one of the most consequential and closely watched case studies of this dynamic. Home to Bolsa Família — arguably the most celebrated conditional cash transfer program in the world, and a model replicated across dozens of low- and middle-income countries — Brazil became a laboratory for understanding how far-right administrations navigate the politically treacherous terrain of dismantling popular social programs without incurring the electoral costs that open retrenchment would entail. The article published in Latin American Perspectives offers a timely and analytically rigorous examination of this process, asking not whether the Bolsonaro government attacked Bolsa Família, but precisely how it did so, and through what mechanisms the program was transformed into Auxílio Brasil during the COVID-19 crisis.
The central analytical contribution of this article lies in its engagement with the distinction between deliberate dismantling and institutional drift — two very different modes through which policy retrenchment can occur. Deliberate dismantling implies an intentional, publicly visible effort to abolish or radically curtail a program, typically through legislative action or executive decree. Drift, by contrast, refers to a subtler and often more politically effective process in which a program's formal structure remains nominally intact while its operational content, administrative logic, targeting criteria, or benefit levels are gradually altered in ways that undermine its original purpose. The Bolsonaro administration's management of cash transfers appears to have operated primarily through the latter mechanism. By rebranding Bolsa Família as Auxílio Brasil, the government achieved several simultaneous political objectives: it erased the symbolic legacy of the Workers' Party (PT) and its association with Lula, it created a superficial impression of policy innovation, and it obscured continuities and ruptures in the program's actual functioning. The transformation was not merely cosmetic, however — the restructuring introduced new conditionalities, altered targeting mechanisms, and temporarily inflated benefit levels in the run-up to the 2022 elections in ways that critics identified as nakedly clientelistic rather than welfare-enhancing.
The COVID-19 crisis is central to understanding how this transformation unfolded. The pandemic created both a constraint and an opportunity for the Bolsonaro government. As a constraint, the scale of economic devastation rendered any straightforward reduction in social spending politically untenable — indeed, the emergency Auxílio Emergencial program, introduced in 2020, temporarily transferred cash to tens of millions of Brazilians and represented a massive, if reluctant, expansion of social protection. The political lesson the government appeared to draw from this experience was that conditional cash transfers commanded extraordinary popular support and could be wielded as electoral instruments. As an opportunity, the pandemic's disruption of normal institutional routines and legislative calendars created space for executive-driven restructuring that might have faced greater resistance under ordinary circumstances. The rebranding of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil in late 2021 came at the precise moment when emergency pandemic payments were being wound down, and the timing was evidently calculated to absorb and redirect the political capital that the Auxílio Emergencial had generated for the administration. What looked like program expansion was, in structural terms, a reorganization that introduced significant programmatic instabilities while serving the president's re-election strategy.
This case connects to broader patterns in the political economy of social policy under right-wing populism that scholars of welfare states and development have been tracking across multiple regional contexts. The experience of Bolsonaro's Brazil echoes, with important national variations, dynamics observed in Hungary under Orbán, in the United States under Trump's approach to Medicaid and food assistance, and in several other contexts where far-right governments have sought to hollow out redistributive programs without eliminating them outright. A recurring logic across these cases is the attempt to decouple programs from their original redistributive rationale — grounded in rights, entitlements, or social solidarity — and recouple them to narratives of conditional reward, work requirements, national loyalty, or moral desert. This ideological reframing matters because it reshapes the political coalitions that defend programs over time: programs understood as universal rights generate broader and more durable constituencies than programs understood as charity or temporary support for the deserving poor. The drift from Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil may therefore have long-term consequences for the political sustainability of cash transfers in Brazil that extend beyond the Bolsonaro period itself, even as the Lula government that succeeded it has moved to restore and expand the program under the revived Bolsa Família banner.
The research significance of this article is substantial for both the academic study of social policy and for development practitioners engaged in program design and evaluation. For scholars, it contributes to a growing literature on policy retrenchment mechanisms that moves beyond simple typologies of expansion and contraction to examine the more granular processes through which program character changes even when formal structures persist. The concept of drift, borrowed from historical institutionalism, is particularly productive here because it directs analytical attention toward what programs actually do rather than what they are called or what their enabling legislation formally specifies. For ODA practitioners and development finance institutions that have invested heavily in cash transfer architecture across the Global South — often using Bolsa Família as a reference model — the Brazilian case raises difficult questions about program resilience under conditions of political volatility. If a program as institutionally embedded, internationally recognized, and electorally popular as Bolsa Família could be substantially reorganized and instrumentalized within a single presidential term, what does this imply for the durability of similar programs in countries with weaker institutional foundations and less robust civil society oversight?
Looking forward, the transformation of Bolsa Família under Bolsonaro and its subsequent restoration under Lula's return to power in 2023 offers a comparative arc that researchers and policymakers will need to examine carefully. The Lula government's decision to reconstitute Bolsa Família — with significantly expanded coverage and benefit levels — represents a deliberate effort to re-anchor the program in its original redistributive logic and to restore its associations with PT governance and progressive social citizenship. Whether this restoration represents a durable institutional reembedding or merely a pendulum swing that the next right-wing administration will reverse again remains an open question, and one with consequences that extend far beyond Brazil. The broader lesson this literature points toward is that the political sustainability of social protection programs depends not only on technical design quality or benefit generosity, but on the depth of the normative frameworks and political coalitions that underpin them. As far-right political movements continue to contest and occupy state power across Latin America and globally, understanding the varied mechanisms through which they reshape social policy — and the conditions under which those reshapings prove reversible — must remain a central preoccupation for development scholars and practitioners alike.