ABSTRACT
Lula da Silva's and Dilma Rousseff's presidencies produced significant changes in Brazil's social panorama in the early 2000s and middle 2010s. Sharp reductions in hunger and food insecurity, income inequality, and child labour were the best-known social advances, due to the pace at which they occurred, and the large number of people and regions which benefited. Increased opportunities for formal employment, access to universities, and social mobility are other aspects less mentioned, but equally impressive. Several studies by research centres and multilateral organisations point out that these were the consequences of strengthened education and universal health policies, combined with various redistributive, and/or affirmative action programmes. They took place in a favourable economic era, both nationally and internationally, during a solidarity-with-the-poorest zeitgeist in the 2000s. The persistence of the international financial crisis of 2007/8, pressure for fiscal austerity and cuts to social programmes then combined with loss of support for a pro-poor agenda in Brazil. This led to a period of political instabilities in the middle 2010s, the election of Jair Bolsonaro's right wing government. Quickly the government's dismantling of social programmes, with the pandemics, brought back hunger, child labour, and other social problems.
