Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-18
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between far-right populist governments and social policy has become one of the defining questions of contemporary political economy. Across Latin America and beyond, the rise of right-wing nationalist administrations has prompted sustained debate about whether such governments systematically dismantle redistributive welfare architecture, or whether institutional inertia, electoral pressures, and fiscal constraints produce something more ambiguous — a gradual drift rather than a decisive rupture. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers one of the most instructive laboratories for this question, not least because it involved a far-right administration inheriting one of the developing world's most celebrated and studied conditional cash transfer programs. The transformation of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil, accelerated and shaped by the catastrophic pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, illuminates the contradictions that emerge when ideological hostility to redistributive statism collides with the political imperatives of mass democracy and humanitarian crisis.
The article published in Latin American Perspectives (Volume 53, Issue 2, March 2026) takes as its central puzzle the paradox of a far-right government that, despite its rhetorical commitments to neoliberal austerity, fiscal discipline, and a minimalist conception of the state, presided over the dramatic expansion of direct cash transfers to the Brazilian poor. At first glance, Bolsonaro's extension and transformation of Bolsa Família appears to contradict the standard theoretical expectation that far-right governments will roll back redistributive social policy. The Bolsonaro administration famously dismissed the existing conditional cash transfer framework inherited from the Workers' Party governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff, rebranding the program as Auxílio Brasil and substantially increasing benefit values ahead of the 2022 presidential election. The analytical contribution of this research lies in its refusal to treat this expansion as evidence either of ideological coherence or of policy continuity. Instead, the article argues that the transformation represents a politically motivated restructuring that simultaneously instrumentalized the welfare state for electoral purposes while hollowing out its programmatic and institutional logic — neither straightforward dismantling nor genuine preservation, but a politically driven drift with structural consequences.
The COVID-19 crisis is central to understanding this trajectory. When the pandemic struck in 2020, Brazil faced one of the world's most severe outbreaks, compounded by profound structural inequalities in income, housing, and access to healthcare. The federal government's initial resistance to large-scale fiscal intervention gave way to the introduction of Auxílio Emergencial, a temporary emergency cash transfer that reached over 66 million Brazilians at its peak and represented a significant expansion of the state's direct role in income support. This episode is analytically significant because it demonstrates how extreme humanitarian pressure can force even ideologically hostile administrations to deploy welfare instruments at scale. Yet the emergency transfers were explicitly framed as temporary and crisis-driven, not as an affirmation of social rights. When they were wound down and partially folded into the reconstituted Auxílio Brasil, the programmatic shift carried important implications: the conditionality framework inherited from Bolsa Família was weakened, the institutional infrastructure of social assistance was strained, and the political rationale for the expanded program was nakedly electoral rather than grounded in social protection principles. This is precisely what the article's conceptual framing of "drifting" rather than "dismantling" captures — the program's form expanded while its institutional and normative foundations eroded.
The broader regional and global significance of this case extends well beyond Brazil's borders. Across Latin America, conditional cash transfer programs have been among the most consequential social policy innovations of the past three decades, credited with reducing extreme poverty and pioneering new modes of state-citizen interaction around social rights. Yet they have also proven politically malleable in ways that scholars are only beginning to fully reckon with. In Mexico, AMLO's administration restructured cash transfer programs while dismantling some of the conditionality mechanisms that defined the original CCT model. In Argentina, successive governments have reshaped the Asignación Universal por Hijo in ways that reflect partisan and fiscal pressures. The Brazilian case analyzed in this article adds a crucial dimension: it shows how far-right governments can exploit the electoral popularity of direct income transfers while simultaneously deconstructing the welfare state logic that gave those programs their transformative potential. From an international development perspective, this has significant implications for how bilateral and multilateral donors assess the durability of social policy gains in middle-income countries navigating political volatility. ODA frameworks that anchor social development benchmarks to program expenditure or beneficiary headcounts risk missing the deeper institutional and normative erosion that can occur even as cash flows nominally continue.
For policy researchers and development practitioners, the findings raise pressing questions about institutional resilience and the conditions under which social policy achievements can survive changes in government. One of the structural vulnerabilities revealed by the Bolsonaro period is the extent to which Brazil's social protection system remained dependent on political will at the federal executive level, despite decades of institutional consolidation under the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS). When the executive proved hostile or indifferent to the programmatic logic of the system — to the investment in social workers, to the maintenance of the CadÚnico beneficiary registry, to the articulation of cash transfers with complementary health and education conditionalities — the formal existence of a flagship program was insufficient to sustain its developmental function. This points toward a broader lesson for comparative social policy: the persistence of a program's name and nominal budget is not a reliable indicator of institutional continuity or programmatic integrity.
Looking forward, the election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in late 2022 and the reconstitution of the program once again as Bolsa Família under his administration provide an important epilogue that researchers and practitioners must engage with carefully. The ease with which the Bolsonaro administration rebranded and restructured the program, and the subsequent ease with which Lula reversed those changes, speaks to a deeper question about the institutionalization of social rights in Brazil. Whether the current administration can rebuild not only the benefit architecture but the institutional culture and bureaucratic capacity that was degraded during the Bolsonaro years remains an open research question of considerable importance. For scholars of political economy, the broader implication is that the politics of social policy transformation under populist and far-right governments requires analytical frameworks that are sensitive to the distinction between dismantling and drifting — between overt retrenchment and the subtler processes through which programs are hollowed out from within while their surface forms are preserved or even expanded for political advantage. The Brazilian case, as analyzed in this article, is likely to remain a reference point for this scholarly agenda for years to come.