Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-23
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The resurgence of far-right populism across Latin America has prompted urgent questions about the durability of social protection systems built painstakingly over decades of center-left governance. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers one of the most consequential and analytically rich case studies of this tension, not least because Brazil had developed one of the world's most celebrated conditional cash transfer programs in Bolsa Família, a program that became an international benchmark for poverty reduction and was widely emulated across the Global South. When Bolsonaro came to power in 2019 with a platform skeptical of welfare dependency and hostile to the Workers' Party legacy, observers immediately asked whether programs like Bolsa Família would be dismantled outright or would survive in some altered form. The article published in Latin American Perspectives examines precisely this question, centering its analysis on the conversion of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil during the COVID-19 pandemic and what this transformation reveals about the political logic of social policy under far-right governance.
The article's central analytical contribution lies in its interrogation of a binary that has dominated discussions of right-wing governments and welfare states: the dismantlement thesis versus the retrenchment thesis. Much of the comparative welfare state literature, drawing on Paul Pierson's foundational work, has argued that social programs become entrenched through their own political constituencies and are therefore difficult to abolish even by ideologically hostile governments. The Brazilian case complicates and extends this framework in important ways. Bolsonaro did not dismantle Bolsa Família in the manner that a straightforward application of the "welfare chauvinism" literature might predict. Instead, what occurred was a subtler and arguably more consequential process of institutional drift and partial transformation. The program was renamed, its eligibility criteria were modified, its benefit levels were altered, and its political framing was fundamentally reoriented away from the social citizenship language of the Lula years toward a more patronage-inflected, electorally motivated discourse. The article's title — "Dismantling or Drifting?" — signals that this ambiguity is not a limitation of the analysis but its very subject, and the authors treat drift as a politically productive category in its own right, one that can produce substantive policy change through gradual erosion rather than direct confrontation.
The COVID-19 pandemic introduced a profound complication into what might otherwise have been a steady rightward drift. Faced with a catastrophic public health and economic emergency, the Bolsonaro government was compelled — largely by congressional pressure and civil society mobilization — to dramatically expand social transfers through the Auxílio Emergencial program in 2020, which at its peak reached nearly 68 million Brazilians and provided benefits substantially larger than those offered by Bolsa Família. This created a deeply paradoxical situation in which one of the most ideologically anti-welfare presidents in Brazilian history presided over what was functionally the largest social transfer program in the country's history. The article appears to read this not as ideological contradiction but as evidence of how emergency conditions create political openings that governments must exploit or risk electoral sanction, even when doing so conflicts with their stated commitments. As the emergency subsided, the Bolsonaro administration moved to consolidate these gains into Auxílio Brasil, a program whose architecture retained some of the universalist coverage expanded during the pandemic while simultaneously introducing elements designed to distinguish it from its Workers' Party predecessor. The renaming itself was a political act, marking a discursive break from Lula-era social policy while the material continuities remained more ambiguous.
This case carries significant implications for how scholars and practitioners understand the relationship between far-right governance, social policy, and development outcomes across Latin America and the broader Global South. The Brazilian experience suggests that far-right governments face structural constraints on their capacity to retrench popular social programs, particularly when those programs have become woven into the everyday survival strategies of millions of low-income households. At the same time, the case illustrates that the absence of formal dismantlement should not be mistaken for programmatic stability. When governments reframe programs, alter bureaucratic implementation, reduce conditionality enforcement, shift targeting criteria, or deploy benefits as instruments of electoral mobilization rather than rights-based entitlements, they can produce meaningful policy change without triggering the political backlash that explicit cuts would generate. For the international development community and ODA practitioners who have looked to Brazil as a model of effective social protection, these findings raise uncomfortable questions about the transferability of institutional design lessons in contexts where the political coalitions that originally built and sustained such programs have lost power. The architecture of a program does not automatically preserve its spirit or its distributional commitments when governing values change.
Looking forward, the return of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to the presidency in 2023 and the subsequent reconstitution of the Bolsa Família program — replacing Auxílio Brasil — provides an important coda to the analytical story the article tells, one that invites further research into the reversibility of institutional drift. Whether Lula's restoration of the Bolsa Família brand and its associated social citizenship framework represents genuine programmatic reconstruction or primarily a discursive repositioning of similar material arrangements remains a pressing empirical question. For researchers working on social policy resilience, the Brazilian trajectory across the Bolsonaro years offers a uniquely compressed laboratory for examining how programs with deep popular legitimacy bend, adapt, and in some instances absorb political pressures that might have been expected to break them. For practitioners in international development, the lesson is simultaneously sobering and instructive: the longevity of social protection gains depends not only on program design and coverage metrics but on the durability of the political and ideational coalitions that legitimate them as entitlements rather than concessions. In an era of rising populist nationalism across the developing world, that distinction may well determine whether decades of progress in poverty reduction prove durable or remain permanently vulnerable to the volatility of electoral politics.