Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-06-29
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The rise of far-right populist governments across Latin America and beyond has generated significant scholarly debate about the fate of redistributive social policy under ideologically hostile administrations. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offered one of the most consequential test cases for this question, given the country's long history as a laboratory for large-scale conditional cash transfer programs and its position as the region's largest economy. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced an additional layer of complexity, forcing governments of all ideological stripes to expand social protection in ways that contradicted, or at least complicated, their stated political commitments. The article published in Latin American Perspectives examines precisely this tension — how a self-consciously anti-welfare, market-oriented, and culturally conservative administration navigated the transformation of Brazil's flagship social program, Bolsa Família, into what became Auxílio Brasil — and what that transformation reveals about the deeper logics of social policy under far-right governance.
Bolsa Família had for nearly two decades been the defining achievement of the Workers' Party (PT) governments under Lula and Dilma Rousseff. By the time Bolsonaro took office in 2019, the program reached over fourteen million families and had become internationally recognized as a model of targeted poverty reduction. It carried, however, an unmistakable ideological genealogy that made it symbolically problematic for a government determined to discredit its predecessors. The COVID-19 crisis, which arrived with devastating force in Brazil from early 2020 onward, forced the Bolsonaro administration into a fundamental dilemma: the pandemic exposed enormous vulnerabilities in Brazil's informal economy and among its poorest citizens, creating political pressure for social protection even as the government's ideological commitments pulled in the opposite direction. The emergency cash transfer program — Auxílio Emergencial — that the administration eventually launched, under significant congressional pressure and public demand, actually exceeded Bolsa Família in benefit levels and coverage, briefly expanding Brazil's social safety net to an extraordinary degree. The subsequent absorption and rebranding of Bolsa Família into Auxílio Brasil in 2021 must be understood against this backdrop of emergency-driven expansion and the political arithmetic of an administration seeking to neutralize a potent electoral liability heading into the 2022 elections.
What the Latin American Perspectives article appears to document is not a straightforward dismantling of Brazil's social protection architecture — the blunter hypothesis one might expect from a far-right administration — but rather something more institutionally complex and politically revealing: a drift in program design, targeting logic, and administrative coherence that accumulated incrementally rather than through dramatic legislative rupture. This aligns with a broader strand of comparative welfare state scholarship that emphasizes how retrenchment under democratic conditions rarely takes the form of frontal assault, given the electoral costs such visibility entails. Instead, erosion occurs through neglect, administrative underfunding, eligibility tightening, and the slow decay of program capacity. The Bolsonaro case, however, introduces a complicating variable: the government simultaneously oversaw a populist expansion of nominal benefit levels under Auxílio Brasil — particularly in the months before the 2022 presidential election — while allowing the program's institutional infrastructure, inter-agency coordination, and the social work networks that supported beneficiary families to deteriorate. The result was a program that was larger by the crude metric of transfer value but arguably weaker in its developmental architecture, its connection to health and education conditionalities, and its social inclusion framework. This tension between electoral-driven generosity and structural attrition is precisely what makes the Brazilian case so analytically productive for scholars of social policy under populist governments.
The broader regional context illuminates why this matters beyond Brazil's borders. Across Latin America, the 2010s and early 2020s witnessed a second wave of right-wing electoral victories — in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, and El Salvador among others — each of which raised comparable questions about the durability of social policy legacies constructed by center-left governments. The evidence has been decidedly mixed: some programs proved more resilient than expected, protected by bureaucratic inertia, civil society mobilization, and the political costs of visible cuts; others were quietly gutted through administrative means. Brazil's experience under Bolsonaro suggests that cash transfer programs occupying the commanding heights of a country's anti-poverty architecture may be particularly resistant to outright elimination but highly vulnerable to what scholars have called "policy drift" — a process by which institutions lose their functional capacity while their formal existence is maintained. The COVID-19 pandemic sharpened this dynamic by creating a window in which emergency measures could coexist with structural weakening, obscuring the underlying trajectory of the program until the emergency funds dissipated. For scholars working on the political economy of social protection, the Brazilian case thus offers an important corrective to overly dichotomous framings that ask only whether programs survive or are abolished, without attending to the more granular question of what they become in the process.
The policy implications of this analysis extend to debates within the international development and ODA communities about program design, resilience, and the conditions under which social protection investments can be sustained across political transitions. Donor governments and multilateral institutions that have championed Brazil's conditional cash transfer model as an exportable blueprint for poverty reduction must grapple with the evidence that institutional context, administrative capacity, and political commitment are not mere background conditions but constitutive elements of program effectiveness. When those conditions change — as they did dramatically with the Bolsonaro administration — the formal persistence of a program does not guarantee the preservation of its developmental logic. For practitioners engaged in building social protection systems in fragile political environments, the Brazilian experience suggests that design choices that embed program function in specific bureaucratic cultures, inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms, and local social work infrastructure may be more vulnerable to drift than purely administrative or cash-delivery architectures. At the same time, the evidence that far-right governments face genuine electoral constraints in dismantling popular anti-poverty programs offers a counterpoint to more pessimistic assessments of social policy durability under hostile administrations.
Looking forward, Lula's return to the presidency in January 2023 and the subsequent restoration and expansion of Bolsa Família — rebranded once again to its original name and accompanied by a significant increase in benefit levels under the Bolsa Família revitalization package — provides an opportunity to assess the lasting damage inflicted during the Bolsonaro years. Early evidence suggests that the administrative and social work infrastructure that supported the program's more developmental functions was indeed degraded in ways that cannot be immediately restored by political will alone, even when fiscal resources are available. For researchers, this creates a valuable longitudinal comparative opportunity: tracking which dimensions of program quality recover quickly under favorable political conditions and which exhibit longer-lasting path dependency from the period of drift. More broadly, the Brazilian case speaks to one of the central questions in contemporary comparative political economy — whether the social policy achievements of the early twenty-first century "pink tide" in Latin America have created durable institutional legacies capable of surviving the ideological reversals that followed, or whether they remain contingent on the political alignments that produced them. The answer, as Brazil's experience suggests, is neither reassuringly optimistic nor straightforwardly grim, but rather situated in the granular, contested, and often invisible terrain of administrative capacity, program integrity, and the political economy of social protection under conditions of democratic uncertainty.