A Previdência Social nos governos Lula e Dilma Rousseff: contradições e inflexões

Abstract

This paper presents the measures introduced in the General Regime of Social Security during the governments of the Workers Party (2003-2016), with the objective of investigating their contradictions and inflections in the configuration of social security rights, establishing as a comparative parameter the counterreformist process carried out by the predecessor government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002). Backed by the specialized literature, in the analysis of official documents and statistical data produced by the Ministry of Social Security, it was verified that such measures, officially known as social security "inclusion" measures, establish a contradictory relationship of tension and convergence with the counterreformist process conducted by the predecessor government, in which the predominant moment, despite the displacements, is the continuity of the large capital project for Social Security, whose guidelines are expressed in documents and recommendations of the international financial agencies. Through new socio-historical mediations, determined by the correlation of social forces in the Latin American continent, by the cycle of growth and crisis that marks the first two decades of the twenty-first century, via social-liberalism and under the veneer of neodevelopment, measures introduced in the General Regime by the governments of the Workers' Party have extended social security coverage to certain fractions of the working class, especially the most impoverished ones, within its political project of reducing extreme poverty and activating the internal market, but without making a qualitative leap in the direction of a universal, inclusive and truly redistributive public welfare system. With the recurrence of the world economic crisis, as of 2011, there is a continuous and progressive deepening of fiscal austerity, which affects social rights, especially social security rights, evidencing the exhaustion of that political project, with the intensification of the counterreformist march on Social Security.