Source: Latin American Perspectives | Published: 2026-07-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: bolsonaro, brazil, far-right, government, policy, politics, social policy
The relationship between far-right governance and social protection programs has become one of the defining political puzzles of the contemporary period. Across much of the Global South, governments with ideological commitments to market liberalization, reduced state expenditure, and the dismantling of redistributive infrastructure have nonetheless found themselves presiding over — and in some cases expanding — flagship welfare programs originally designed by center-left administrations. Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro offers perhaps the most instructive and paradoxical case study of this dynamic. The transformation of Bolsa Família, long regarded as a global model for conditional cash transfer programs and a pillar of the Workers' Party's social contract, into Auxílio Brasil between 2021 and 2022 raises fundamental questions about the ideological coherence of far-right governance, the electoral pressures that shape social policy even in politically hostile environments, and the long-term institutional consequences of policy change that is driven more by political calculation than by programmatic vision. As the field of comparative social policy grapples with the global resurgence of the right, Brazil's experience provides an essential reference point.
The article by the authors in Latin American Perspectives places the Bolsonaro-era transformation of Brazil's central cash transfer architecture within a framework that resists simple narratives of either dismantling or continuity. The conceptual tension embedded in the title — dismantling or drifting — captures something genuinely important about the nature of far-right social policy. Bolsonaro and his administration were never ideologically indifferent to Bolsa Família; they were rhetorically hostile to it, having long associated the program with clientelism, dependency culture, and the political machine of the Workers' Party. Yet the administration did not abolish the program. Instead, it allowed a period of underfunding and administrative neglect — what scholars of welfare state change would recognize as a form of drift — before the COVID-19 pandemic generated irresistible pressure for emergency social intervention. The creation of Auxílio Brasil can be read as the product of this pressure, an expansion of coverage and benefit levels that, on its surface, appeared to represent a deepening of social protection. The article's core contribution is to situate this surface appearance against the underlying institutional and political architecture that produced it, revealing a transformation that was less about genuine programmatic commitment and more about the convergence of electoral timing, pandemic emergency, and the Bolsonaro government's need to neutralize one of its most significant political liabilities heading into the 2022 election cycle.
The COVID-19 crisis played a structurally unique role in this story. Emergency cash transfer programs proliferated across Latin America during the pandemic, and several governments with varying ideological profiles expanded social protection temporarily. But in Brazil, the emergency took on particular salience because the Bolsonaro government had, in the months preceding the pandemic, allowed the number of Bolsa Família beneficiary families to fall significantly below enrollment targets, even as poverty and food insecurity were already rising. The pandemic thus exposed not merely a public health failure but a failure of social protection stewardship. The Auxílio Emergencial program, hastily enacted in 2020 with benefit levels far exceeding the original Bolsa Família amounts, temporarily reached tens of millions of households and had measurable effects on poverty and inequality metrics. Its eventual transition into Auxílio Brasil — a rebranded, expanded, but institutionally weakened successor — thus reflects a complicated political logic: the Bolsonaro government sought to claim credit for generosity it had initially resisted, while simultaneously avoiding the institutional entrenchment that would have characterized a genuine commitment to the program. The result was a program that expanded in nominal terms while losing many of the conditionality monitoring mechanisms, targeting instruments, and interministerial coordination structures that had made Bolsa Família administratively functional and politically durable.
From the perspective of ODA scholarship and development policy, the Brazilian case has implications that extend well beyond the country's borders. One of the central debates in international development over the past two decades has concerned the institutionalization of social protection systems in middle-income countries — whether cash transfer programs, once established, develop sufficient political constituencies and bureaucratic depth to survive changes in government. The evidence from Brazil suggests that the answer is complicated and context-dependent. Bolsa Família did survive Bolsonaro, in the sense that a cash transfer program continued to operate and was subsequently restored and substantially expanded under the Lula administration that returned to power in January 2023 under the banner of the Bolsa Família Restored program. But the period of Bolsonaro governance inflicted real institutional damage: the targeting systems were weakened, the benefit adequacy was inconsistent, and the administrative culture that had made the program a reference point for developing country social policy was partially eroded. For international donors and development agencies that have invested in promoting social protection as a cornerstone of sustainable development, Brazil's experience is a reminder that program survival and program integrity are distinct phenomena, and that the political economy of far-right governance can produce forms of institutional damage that are slow to accumulate, difficult to observe in real time, and costly to reverse.
The political dimensions of this transformation also speak to broader debates about the behavior of far-right governments when confronted with inherited welfare states. A growing body of comparative politics scholarship has examined the paradox of right-wing populist governments that campaign against redistributive programs while proving reluctant to dismantle them in office, partly out of fear of alienating working-class electoral bases and partly because the political costs of visible welfare retrenchment are asymmetrically high. Bolsonaro's trajectory fits this pattern while adding a dimension that is particularly salient in the Latin American context: the role of competitive authoritarian pressures and electoral calendar proximity in shaping social policy timing. The expansion of Auxílio Brasil in the months preceding the 2022 presidential election, accompanied by a relaxation of the fiscal responsibility rules that had constrained social spending, has been widely analyzed as an explicit attempt to use social transfers as an electoral instrument. This does not mean the benefits were not real for recipients — they were — but it does mean that the program's expansion was structured in ways that prioritized visibility and short-term generosity over administrative coherence and long-term fiscal sustainability.
For researchers focused on the political economy of Latin American development, the article contributes to a growing literature that takes seriously the policy agency of far-right governments without either overstating their ideological consistency or dismissing the genuine distributional consequences of their choices. The Bolsonaro case illustrates that far-right governments in the region operate within structural constraints — institutional legacies, electoral dynamics, pandemic shocks — that shape their social policy outcomes in ways that cannot be reduced to ideological preference alone. Future research will need to grapple with the comparative question of whether Brazil's pattern of drift-and-nominal-expansion is generalizable to other cases of far-right governance in social policy-rich middle-income countries, or whether it reflects specific features of the Brazilian political system, including its fragmented multiparty presidentialism and the particular institutional depth of Bolsa Família as a program. For practitioners in the development and humanitarian space, the lesson is perhaps more immediately actionable: the resilience of social protection systems depends not only on the existence of political constituencies for their continuation but on the maintenance of the administrative and informational infrastructure that makes programs function. That infrastructure is quietly vulnerable to governments that are not committed to its preservation, even when they lack the political will to pursue outright abolition.