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Advancing Toward the Past: The Dismantling of the Unified Social Assistance System

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Social Policy Dismantling and De-democratization in Brazil

Part of the book series: Societies and Political Orders in Transition ((SOCPOT))

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Abstract

The chapter analyses the recent changes within the Unified Social Assistance System (SUAS) in Brazil, as part of a policy dismantling. It focuses on identifying the causes, conditions, and strategies adopted by the political actors, and also analyzing how this process affects the social assistance policy. The guiding hypothesis is that changes in the political coalition made the return of conservative, and neoliberal-oriented social groups possible. These groups took advantage of gaps and ambiguities in the design and implementation of the SUAS to reconfigure the policy’s instruments, subverting its principles and purposes. The changes are mainly justified by the permanent austerity, announced as necessary and inescapable, and find support from a segment of society, especially the middle strata, with its moral repertoire against the poorest people.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In 2003, the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT) reached the Presidency with the electoral victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for two consecutive terms (2003–2006 and 2007–2010). The PT remained in power with the presidential election of Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014), also re-elected for a second term. President Dilma, however, was the victim of a judicial-parliamentary and media coup, leading to her ousting in 2016. In her place, then Vice-President Michel Temer took office, who is affiliated to the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro—MDB) Party. In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro took office as President through an extreme-right coalition headed by the Liberal Social Party (Partido Social Liberal—PSL). He won in an electoral bid in which his main opponent (and who was leading in the polls), former President Lula, was prevented from running due to his imprisonment, on charges later recognized by the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court as unfounded.

  2. 2.

    In 2016, Michel Temer, by then President, forwarded a proposal to Congress for a constitutional amendment instituting a new national fiscal regime. Constitutional Amendment No. 95, (Emenda Constitucional—EC 95) approved by parliament, froze primary expenditures for a period of 20 years—that is, public spending and investments. EC 95, however, does not affect financial expenses related to interest and amortization payments on public debt. Note that, according to the 2015 Public Audit, 42.4% of the national budget was reserved for interest and amortization payments (Fatorelli, 2016).

  3. 3.

    Although the term is not exclusive to the Brazilian context, the meaning is quite different from other societies. In Brazil, the First Lady image was historically associated to a lady of charity, selfless, and caring for the poorest and most destitute. Thus, the social assistance conducted by First Ladies was recognized as a favor and not a social right.

  4. 4.

    The social assistance policy was initially linked to the Ministry of Housing and Social Welfare, created in 1988 and changed, in the following year, to the Ministry of Social Action. It was extinguished in 1992, giving way to the Ministry of Social Well-Being, which would last until 1998, when the Ministry of Social Security and Social Assistance was created. Despite having the same name from the period of the military dictatorship, the latter had a very different setup, among them the absence of the healthcare policy, which now had an exclusive institutionality under the Ministry of Health (Franzese, 2010).

  5. 5.

    For a critical view of the 2016 Coup, from different angles and analytical perspectives, see the studies by Proner et al. (2016), Souza (2016), Mascaro (2018), Miguel (2019), and Nascimento et al. (2020), among others.

  6. 6.

    The PMDB was established in 1979, replacing the then-MDB (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro—Brazilian Democratic Movement), the opposition party in the bipartisanship of the Military Dictatorship. The MDB was one of the protagonists in the process of re-democratizing the country in the 1970s and 1980s. With the return of multipartyism, the name was changed to PMDB and it began achieving significant political strength, forming the largest caucus in Congress, in addition to heading the governments of several Brazilian states. The party, however, had never directly elected a president, having reached the highest public office in the country twice through vice-presidents (in 1985, with José Sarney and in 2016, with Michel Temer). Its composition is highly heterogeneous, with several political figures often involved in allegations of corruption. In 2018, the name was changed back to MDB.

  7. 7.

    Recorded in the 1988 Federal Constitution as one of the objectives of the social assistance policy, the Continuous Cash Benefit (BPC) is intended for the elderly and people with disabilities with a monthly family per capita income of less than one-fourth of the minimum wage (less than US$54). It is an individual, nonpermanent, and non-transferable benefit, paid directly to the beneficiary by means of a bank card. It has no conditionalities and a monthly value of one minimum wage (about US$213 in 2021). Its creation represents a significant innovation in the social protection system, mainly by constitutionalizing, for the first time in the country, a monetary benefit disconnected from the insurance schemes that modeled the hegemonic model of social intervention by the Brazilian State. In January 2022, BPC covered 4,738,332 beneficiaries, 54% of whom were people with disabilities and 46% were seniors.

  8. 8.

    The Family Allowance Program (PBF) was established in 2004 and is aimed at poor and extremely poor families, thus defined based on a threshold in per capita family income. PBF combines direct cash transfers to beneficiary families with a set of conditions in the areas of education (minimum school attendance) and health (immunization, prenatal care, and child growth and development), thus tying immediate poverty relief measures with initiatives having medium- and long-term effects to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty. The amounts paid vary according to the type of benefit, consisting of a fixed component (paid to families in extreme poverty) and another variable, based on family composition (children and adolescents from 0 to 15 years of age, young people up to 17 years of age, pregnant women, and nursing mothers), up to the limit of five variable benefits per family. In October 2021, before, however, being extinguished, the program reached 14,654,783 families, which represented 23.9% of the Brazilian population. Alongside BPC, PBF resulted in important social and economic improvements for its beneficiaries, such as increased consumption capacity, access to food and health services, school attendance, guaranteed income, and reduced indicators for poverty and extreme poverty.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fluminense Federal University, Niteroi, Brazil

    Mônica de Castro Maia Senna

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  1. Mônica de Castro Maia Senna
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Correspondence to Mônica de Castro Maia Senna .

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  1. Center for Strategic Studies, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Coordinator of the Interinstitutional Study Group on Futures of Social Protection, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Sonia Fleury

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Senna, M.d.C.M. (2023). Advancing Toward the Past: The Dismantling of the Unified Social Assistance System. In: Fleury, S. (eds) Social Policy Dismantling and De-democratization in Brazil. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35110-5_8

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