Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-19
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between far-right populist governance and social welfare policy has become one of the defining analytical puzzles of contemporary political economy. Across Latin America, Europe, and beyond, scholars and practitioners have grappled with an apparent paradox: governments that rise to power on platforms hostile to state redistribution and technocratic social engineering often find themselves unable — or unwilling — to fully dismantle the social protection architectures they inherit. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro provides one of the most instructive cases for examining this paradox in depth. The transformation of Bolsa Família, one of the world's most celebrated conditional cash transfer programs, into Auxílio Brasil between 2019 and 2022 offers a detailed empirical window into how ideological commitments interact with institutional inertia, electoral calculation, and crisis-driven expediency to produce social policy outcomes that defy simple narratives of either continuity or rupture.
The article under review in Latin American Perspectives engages directly with this puzzle, asking how the COVID-19 crisis shaped the trajectory of social policy under a far-right administration. This framing is significant because it resists the temptation to treat the Bolsonaro government's social policy record as either straightforward ideological demolition or opportunistic preservation. The Bolsa Família program, first institutionalized under Lula da Silva in 2003 and subsequently expanded under Dilma Rousseff, had by the end of the Petista cycle become a deeply embedded feature of Brazilian social citizenship. It reached tens of millions of low-income households, generated robust evidence of poverty reduction and improved human capital outcomes, and had achieved a degree of programmatic legitimacy that cut across partisan lines. When Bolsonaro came to power in January 2019, it was not immediately clear whether his administration would attempt to dismantle this architecture on ideological grounds, freeze it through budgetary neglect, or instrumentalize it for political purposes. The article's central contribution appears to lie in demonstrating that the answer was neither simple dismantlement nor pure continuity, but rather a process of political drift — a reconfiguration of the program's identity, governance structure, and symbolic meaning without a decisive rupture in its core transfer mechanism.
The COVID-19 pandemic injected an extraordinary degree of contingency into this already complex political dynamic. The Bolsonaro government's initial instinct was to minimize the public health dimensions of the crisis and resist large-scale fiscal intervention. Yet the scale of economic disruption — particularly among informal workers who constituted a vast proportion of Bolsonaro's own electoral base — generated enormous political pressure for rapid response. The result was the Auxílio Emergencial, an emergency cash transfer program that, paradoxically, exceeded Bolsa Família in both coverage and generosity at its peak. This was not an ideologically comfortable move for an administration committed to fiscal orthodoxy and skeptical of redistributive statecraft. The article's analytical insight in examining this moment is to show how crisis-driven expansion can coexist with and even accelerate longer-term institutional erosion. Even as benefit levels temporarily surged, the administrative and evaluative infrastructure of the program — the monitoring mechanisms, the conditionality frameworks, the interministerial coordination structures — were being selectively weakened or abandoned. The rebranding of Bolsa Família as Auxílio Brasil in 2021, timed conspicuously ahead of the 2022 electoral cycle, crystallized this dynamic: a programmatic shell was preserved and rhetorically amplified while its institutional substance was hollowed.
This trajectory connects to broader regional patterns that students of Latin American political economy will recognize. The experience of social policy under right-wing populism in the region has repeatedly demonstrated that the electoral logic of social transfers exerts a gravitational pull that even ideologically hostile governments cannot easily escape. In Argentina, the Macri government found itself unable to cut social spending at the pace its economic team desired, partly because the political cost of visible poverty increases proved prohibitive. In Ecuador, the Moreno government's attempts to reform fuel subsidies sparked mass mobilization that forced a rapid reversal. What distinguishes the Brazilian case is the scale and sophistication of the institutional landscape being navigated, and the specific mechanism through which transformation occurred — not dramatic retrenchment but gradual reorientation, what social policy scholars have described as the politics of "drift" and "conversion." The renaming strategy was not merely cosmetic. It represented an attempt to detach the political credit for cash transfers from the Workers' Party legacy and re-anchor it within a Bolsonarista electoral identity, a maneuver that speaks directly to the question of how social policy becomes a resource in partisan competition rather than simply a technocratic instrument of welfare provision.
For researchers and practitioners working in the ODA and global development space, the Brazilian case raises important questions about the resilience and vulnerability of flagship social protection programs in periods of political transition. The international development community invested considerable intellectual and financial capital in promoting conditional cash transfer models across the Global South from the late 1990s onward, often treating programs like Bolsa Família as institutionally robust precisely because their benefit incidence favored large voter constituencies. The Bolsonaro period complicates this optimism without fully refuting it. Programs survived, but their internal governance deteriorated, their conditionality enforcement was relaxed, and their connection to complementary services in health and education weakened. This suggests that electoral entrenchment, while providing a floor against outright elimination, does not protect against the more insidious forms of institutional degradation that can occur when administrations nominally maintain a program while systematically defunding its enabling infrastructure.
Looking forward, the Lula administration's return to power in January 2023 and its early moves to reconstitute and expand the program — relaunched once again under the Bolsa Família name — raise further analytical questions that the field will need to address. Can institutional capacity that was degraded over four years be rapidly rebuilt? Do the communities and bureaucratic networks that sustained Bolsa Família retain enough organizational memory and professional cohesion to restore program quality, or has the intervening period produced path-dependent changes that will prove more durable than they appear? For civil society organizations, social movements, and international partners working in and around Brazilian social policy, understanding the mechanisms through which drift occurred is as important as understanding the more visible politics of benefit levels and coverage rates. The politics of social protection in an era of far-right populism are ultimately the politics of institutional continuity and decay, fought in budget line items, administrative regulations, and bureaucratic appointments as much as in legislative chambers and electoral campaigns. Scholarly work that illuminates these less visible dimensions, as this article in Latin American Perspectives appears to do, makes a contribution that extends well beyond the Brazilian case to the broader global challenge of sustaining developmental social policy in an age of political turbulence.