A passagem do bolsa família para o Auxílio Brasil : movimento de continuidade ou ruptura?

Abstract

The focus of this work is to analyze the movement to replace the Bolsa Família Program with the Auxílio Brasil Program, implemented during the pandemic by former president Jair Messias Bolsonaro. For this reason, the use of systematic analysis was essential so that comparative lines could be drawn between both programs. To give context to the discussion about the past and present of public income redistribution policies in Brazil, a historical overview was made of the construction and development of the Brazilian Welfare State, from 1930 to 1988. Part of the research goes through the numerous non-linear phases of the Brazilian State's social welfare regimes, which after the current federal constitution, established itself as a social-democratic type with a universalist nature, bringing with it a new de-commodified and non-contributory model of protection. This model opens some institutional margin for the creation of policies such as Fome Zero and later, Bolsa Familia, legitimized in the government of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in 2003 and unified through policies that already existed in the previous government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. As a characteristic of the Brazilian State's assistance legacy, in 2021, with the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Auxílio Emergencial Program was established, as a measure to combat vulnerabilities created in times of urgency. Co-existing alongside Bolsa Família, the program was replaced a year after its materialization by the Auxílio Brazil Program and with it the promise of false continuity regarding the Bolsa Família came into effect as a discourse from the far-right government. Part of the monograph aims to understand the main similarities and differences about the Bolsa Família Program, implemented by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, in relation to Auxílio Emergencial and Auxílio Brasil, explaining how both programs, despite being in contexts of reusing institutional design of the PBF, have different purposes. Where the PAB presents itself as a partial replacement for the PBF, since it does not align with what was proposed by the PBF as tackling poverty and social inequalities in a long-term context. And so, they clearly reveal, in view of the proposed implementation of the PAB, the crumbling of the National Social Protection System, that occurs both through the scrapping of the SUS, SUAS AND CADÚNICO, and through the moralization of poverty.