Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-28
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The question of how far-right governments interact with established social welfare architectures has become one of the defining puzzles of contemporary comparative politics. In Brazil, this question has particular urgency because Bolsa Família — the conditional cash transfer program launched under President Lula da Silva in 2003 and progressively consolidated through successive administrations — stood for two decades as the flagship achievement of Brazilian social developmentalism and one of the most studied poverty-reduction interventions in the Global South. When Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency in January 2019, analysts and practitioners working in development policy, ODA design, and social protection were left to ask whether his administration would seek ideological rupture with this legacy or find ways to instrumentalize the program for its own political purposes. The article published in Latin American Perspectives, examining the transformation of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil under the Bolsonaro administration, addresses precisely this tension — and the COVID-19 pandemic, which dramatically reshaped the fiscal and political landscape from 2020 onward, renders this inquiry all the more consequential for how we understand welfare state resilience under illiberal governance.
The analytical lens the article deploys — captured in the title's dichotomy of "dismantling or drifting" — draws implicitly on a rich body of comparative welfare state scholarship that distinguishes between active retrenchment, where ideologically motivated actors deliberately dismantle programs, and more diffuse processes of policy drift, where programs nominally survive but are allowed to erode through benign neglect, underfunding, or institutional hollowing. Bolsonaro's posture toward Bolsa Família is a compelling test case precisely because his ideological inheritance from economic liberalism and social conservatism pointed in contradictory directions. On the one hand, a government committed to radical fiscal austerity and hostile to the Workers' Party's legacy might have been expected to pursue aggressive dismantling. On the other hand, Bolsa Família's beneficiaries constitute a formidable electoral constituency spread across Brazil's poorest northeastern states, and even far-right populists cannot afford to alienate the precarious working poor whose support they frequently court. What the article documents is a trajectory that resists clean categorization: the Bolsonaro administration neither defended Bolsa Família as a social right nor moved to eliminate it outright, but instead exploited the COVID-19 emergency to repackage and politicize social transfers in ways that served short-term electoral calculations while undermining the program's rights-based institutional foundations.
The COVID-19 pandemic created an extraordinary fiscal and political opening that transformed the terms of this debate. Brazil's emergency cash transfer program — Auxílio Emergencial — introduced in 2020 was, paradoxically, more generous than Bolsa Família and temporarily extended social protection to millions of informally employed workers who had never been reached by the existing conditional cash transfer framework. This expansion was not an ideological conversion on Bolsonaro's part; rather, it reflected the combined pressure of a severe public health and economic crisis, congressional initiative, and the political imperative of maintaining popular legitimacy as COVID-19 deaths mounted at a catastrophic scale. When Auxílio Emergencial was wound down and subsequently replaced by the reconfigured Auxílio Brasil in late 2021 — timed deliberately ahead of the 2022 election — the transformation was unmistakably electoral in character. Benefit values were inflated beyond what the fiscal framework could sustain, enrollment was expanded, and the conditionality mechanisms that had given Bolsa Família its distinctive character as an instrument linking transfers to health and education compliance were systematically weakened. This reconfiguration is central to the article's argument: what took place was neither simple retrenchment nor programmatic continuity, but a form of populist recalibration that retained the social transfer as a political instrument while stripping away its developmental logic.
The implications of this trajectory extend well beyond Brazil's domestic policy landscape and speak to broader questions in the international development community about the resilience of social protection institutions in the face of political volatility. For ODA practitioners and the donor community, Bolsa Família has long served as a model for conditional cash transfer design and has influenced program architecture across Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and other parts of Latin America. The conditions under which a well-institutionalized program like Bolsa Família could be politically captured, delinked from its monitoring and evaluation infrastructure, and repurposed as an electoral instrument carry important lessons for program design, particularly regarding the governance arrangements and civil society accountability mechanisms that help insulate social protection from political manipulation. The article contributes to a growing literature suggesting that program institutionalization — the degree to which a social transfer is embedded in administrative routines, professional bureaucracies, and independent monitoring frameworks — is a critical variable in determining resilience under hostile governments, but that even high institutionalization does not guarantee protection against determined populist reconfiguration when fiscal crises create windows for extraordinary policy action.
The Brazilian case also invites reflection on the peculiar dynamics through which far-right governments in the Global South relate to redistributive social policy. Unlike the canonical neoliberal retrenchment scenarios studied in OECD contexts, Bolsonaro's approach to social policy was less about rolling back the state than about redirecting its redistributive capacity toward politically useful ends while dismantling the rights-based and technocratic frameworks that had governed those transfers. This distinction matters for comparative analysis. It suggests that the threat to social protection in the current era of democratic backsliding may come less from classic austerity than from a more insidious process of institutional erosion — what some scholars have called "autocratic welfare" — in which redistributive programs survive but lose their developmental purpose and become instruments of patronage and electoral mobilization. The subsequent restoration of Bolsa Família under President Lula's third term, beginning in 2023, underscores how much the Bolsonaro years represented a deliberate and damaging rupture with the program's institutional DNA, even if the rupture was masked by the nominal survival of a social transfer bearing a different name.
For researchers and practitioners focused on civil society, governance, and development, the article points toward a set of questions that will define the field in the years ahead. How do social movements, recipient communities, and civil society organizations respond when social protection programs are politically captured rather than simply eliminated? What forms of democratic accountability and bureaucratic insulation are most effective at preserving the integrity of large-scale transfer programs during periods of illiberal governance? And how should the international development community engage with governments whose social policy actions are simultaneously expansionary in coverage and regressive in institutional terms? The Brazilian trajectory under Bolsonaro offers no easy answers, but it provides an empirically rich case that challenges overly schematic accounts of welfare state politics under the right and demonstrates that the politics of social policy in emerging democracies require analytical frameworks attuned to the distinctive logics of populist instrumentalization, fiscal crisis, and electoral strategy. As far-right and populist governments continue to reshape social policy landscapes across Latin America and beyond, this kind of careful case-level analysis will remain indispensable for understanding both the limits and the possibilities of progressive social protection in contested democratic environments.