Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-13
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The transformation of social protection systems under populist and far-right governments represents one of the most consequential and contested political processes in contemporary Latin America. Brazil's experience under Jair Bolsonaro between 2019 and 2022 offers a particularly instructive case, not merely because of the scale of the country's welfare state but because of the ideological contradictions that defined the administration's approach to social policy. The renaming and restructuring of Bolsa Família — a flagship conditional cash transfer program long regarded as a model for poverty reduction across the Global South — into Auxílio Brasil encapsulates a broader tension visible across far-right governing projects worldwide: the simultaneous impulse to dismantle redistributive institutions inherited from center-left predecessors and the electoral necessity of retaining, or even expanding, the material benefits those institutions deliver. This tension, amplified dramatically by the COVID-19 pandemic, forms the analytical core of the article published in Latin American Perspectives and raises questions that extend well beyond Brazil's borders.
The article's central inquiry — how the COVID-19 crisis shaped social policy responses under a far-right government — demands attention to a structural paradox that analysts of authoritarian populism have increasingly documented. Bolsonaro came to power on a platform that combined social conservatism, economic liberalism, and hostility toward the Workers' Party (PT) legacy, of which Bolsa Família was among the most symbolically charged elements. Yet the pandemic created conditions in which the federal government was compelled to deploy emergency cash transfers at an unprecedented scale, temporarily reaching millions of Brazilians who had never previously been beneficiaries of formal social protection. The result was a policy trajectory that defied simple categorization as either dismantlement or continuity. The article's framing of this as "drifting" — a concept drawn from historical institutionalist scholarship on welfare state change — rather than outright dismantling captures something real and analytically important: the Bolsonaro government neither abolished social transfers nor deepened them in any structurally meaningful way, but instead allowed opportunistic rebranding to serve political objectives while leaving the underlying architecture of poverty governance fundamentally ambiguous.
Understanding this transformation requires situating it within the broader political economy of Brazilian federalism and electoral competition. Bolsa Família, created under Lula da Silva in 2003 and expanded under Dilma Rousseff, was never merely a technocratic poverty intervention. It was a political institution in the fullest sense — embedded in municipal bureaucracies, tied to social service networks, and productive of durable electoral loyalties in the country's poorer Northeast. When the Bolsonaro administration rebranded the program as Auxílio Brasil in late 2021, the timing was scarcely coincidental: it preceded the 2022 presidential election by less than a year, and the benefit increases that accompanied the rebranding were explicitly tied to fiscal maneuvers that circumvented Brazil's constitutional spending cap. The article's examination of this process contributes to a growing body of comparative scholarship on how far-right governments in Latin America navigate the political costs of austerity. Unlike classical neoliberal technocrats, figures like Bolsonaro operate in democratic systems where the withdrawal of social protections carries immediate electoral risk, particularly among low-income constituencies that may otherwise be susceptible to populist mobilization from the right. The outcome is a distinctive mode of welfare state politics — neither retrenchment nor expansion in the traditional sense, but strategic ambiguity deployed for short-term political gain.
The implications of this analysis for development policy and the international ODA community are significant. For decades, conditional cash transfer programs like Bolsa Família were promoted by the World Bank, UNDP, and bilateral donors as exportable models of efficient, targeted poverty reduction that could substitute for more expensive and administratively complex universal welfare systems. The Brazilian experience under Bolsonaro complicates this narrative in several important ways. First, it demonstrates that targeted programs, however technically sophisticated, remain politically vulnerable to opportunistic manipulation by governments that lack programmatic commitment to poverty reduction as a public good. Second, the COVID-19 emergency revealed the limitations of means-tested delivery systems in reaching informal workers and marginalized populations at moments of acute crisis — a lesson with direct relevance for how donors and multilateral institutions design social protection components in development programming. Third, and perhaps most importantly for the field of civil society studies, the article implicitly raises questions about the role of advocacy organizations, beneficiary networks, and academic epistemic communities in defending social policy institutions against politically motivated erosion. During the Bolsonaro years, civil society organizations in Brazil faced systematic hostility from the federal government, reducing their capacity to monitor and challenge policy changes in real time. This institutional vulnerability is not unique to Brazil and deserves sustained attention from researchers studying ODA-linked governance reform.
Looking forward, the Lula administration's return to power in January 2023 and the subsequent rebranding of Auxílio Brasil back into Bolsa Família — now expanded into the Bolsa Família 2.0 framework — creates a natural comparative moment. Researchers will need to examine not only what was materially preserved or damaged during the Bolsonaro interregnum but also what was institutionally eroded in terms of administrative capacity, data infrastructure, and inter-governmental coordination. The concept of "drift" developed in this article provides a useful analytical tool for that inquiry, one that resists the binary of preservation versus destruction and attends instead to the subtler forms through which social policy institutions are reshaped by governments that lack either the political will to abolish them or the ideological coherence to develop them. For practitioners in the fields of social protection, ODA policy design, and democratic governance, the Brazilian case offers a sobering reminder that the durability of welfare institutions depends not only on technical design or fiscal sustainability but on the political ecosystems — civil society, legislative oversight, judicial review, and engaged scholarship — that sustain them against capture and manipulation. The question of whether Bolsa Família's institutional memory survived the Bolsonaro years intact enough to serve as a foundation for renewed poverty governance will remain a critical empirical and normative question for years to come.