BRAZIL´S PRESIDENT IS LOSING CLOUT ABROAD AND UNPOPULAR AT HOME / THE ECONOMIST

Faded dreams

Brazil’s president is losing clout abroad and unpopular at home

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva put Brazil on the map, but he hasn’t adapted to a changed world

This illustration shows Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in a suit with Brazil's presidential sash holding a large blue balloon. A hand with a pin is about to pop the balloon. The background is the Brazilian flag./ Illustration: Lehel Kovács

On June 22nd, hours after the United States struck Iranian nuclear sites with huge bunker-buster bombs, Brazil’s foreign ministry put out a statement. 

It said that Brazil’s government “strongly condemns” the American attack, which it called a “violation of Iran’s sovereignty and international law”. 

This strength of language put Brazil at odds with Western democracies, which either supported the strikes or merely expressed concern.

Brazil’s friendliness with Iran is set to continue on July 6th and 7th when the BRICS, a group of 11 emerging-market economies including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, holds a summit in Rio de Janeiro. 

Iran, which became a member of the BRICS in 2024, is expected to send a delegation. 

The club is currently chaired by Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula. 

Originally, being a member gave Brazil a platform for global influence. Increasingly, it makes Brazil look hostile to the West.

“The more China transforms the BRICS into an instrument of its foreign policy, and the more Russia uses the BRICS to legitimise its war in Ukraine, the harder it will be for Brazil to keep saying it is non-aligned,” says Matias Spektor of FGV, a university in São Paulo.

Brazil’s diplomats are trying to avoid the problem by focusing the summit on innocuous themes. 

These include co-operation on health care; the green-energy transition; and maintaining most-favoured nation status, in which countries treat members of the World Trade Organisation equally, as the basis for international trade. 

They want to avoid chatter on a subject America’s president, Donald Trump, hates: a BRICS-led effort to settle trade in local currencies rather than the dollar. 

As for the Iranians, Brazil’s diplomats would probably prefer it if they stayed quiet. 

“We are in a moment of damage containment more than a moment of creating new instruments,” says a senior one.

Brazil’s role at the heart of an expanded and more authoritarian-dominated BRICS is part of Lula’s increasingly incoherent foreign policy. 

He has made no effort to forge ties with the United States since Donald Trump took office in January. 

There is no record of the two men ever meeting in person, making Brazil the largest economy whose leader has not shaken hands with America’s president. 

Instead, Lula courts China. He has met Xi Jinping, China’s president, twice in the past year.

Perhaps Lula’s most sensible tack has been an attempt to take advantage of the world’s loss of trust in America as a trade partner. 

He has cosied up to Europe and expanded commercial ties. 

In March he visited Japan, which imports most of its beef from the United States, to promote Brazilian meat. 

His ministers have met Chinese bureaucrats to discuss ways to increase Brazilian agricultural imports, probably instead of American ones.

But this comes with grandiosity which outruns Brazil’s heft. 

In May Lula was the only leader of a big democracy to attend Russia’s commemorations of the end of the second world war. 

He tried to convince Vladimir Putin that Brazil should mediate an end to the war in Ukraine. 

Neither Mr Putin nor anyone else listened.

There is little pragmatism closer to home either. 

Lula does not speak to his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, because of ideological differences. 

When he took office for the third time, in 2023, he embraced Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocrat, despite the country having become a full-fledged dictatorship. 

Having led the UN mission to stabilise Haiti after an earthquake devastated the country in 2010, Brazil now does little as it collapses into a gangster-run hellscape. 

Lula appears unwilling or unable to rally neighbours to present a united front against Mr Trump’s migrant deportations and tariff war.

In a letter sent to The Economist after this story was first published online, Brazil’s foreign minister, Mauro Vieira, pushed back on the idea of foreign-policy incoherence. 

Among other things, he noted that while chairing the G20 last year Lula “succeeded in the daunting task of promoting consensus among its members, while managing to launch a broad global alliance against hunger and poverty”. 

Mr Viera also said that a “bold proposal for taxing billionaires”, put forward at the G20, “may have disturbed a few oligarchs”.

Navigating the world stage is made harder by Lula’s slipping popularity. 

During his first two terms, from 2003 to 2010, Brazil reaped the rewards of a commodity boom and he was one of the world’s most popular leaders. 

His domestic strength lent him credibility abroad, and many of his peers saw him as a figurehead for fast-developing economies.

Now the country has shifted to the right. Many Brazilians associate his Workers’ Party with corruption after a scandal that saw Lula jailed for over a year (his conviction was later annulled). 

He built the party on support from trade unions, Catholics and poor recipients of government handouts. 

In Brazil today evangelical Christianity is booming, employment in agriculture and the gig economy is growing fast, and the right offers handouts too.

Lula’s personal approval ratings hover around 40%, the lowest at any point during his three terms. 

Only 28% of Brazilians say they approve of his government.

Meanwhile, Mr Trump’s MAGA movement is closely aligned with Brazil’s hard right, led by Jair Bolsonaro, a former president who styles himself a tropical Trump. 

Mr Bolsonaro is likely to be jailed soon for allegedly plotting a coup to remain in power after losing an election in 2022. 

He is yet to anoint a successor. 

But if he does so and the right rallies around that person ahead of the election in 2026, the presidency will be theirs to lose.

Mr Trump freely criticises other leaders who are much friendlier than Lula. 

Yet he has said almost nothing about Brazil since taking office in January. 

That may be because Brazil benefits from something no other large emerging economy possesses: a whopping trade deficit with the United States, amounting to $30bn in goods and services a year. 

Mr Trump certainly likes it when other countries buy more from the United States than they sell into it.

But his silence may also be due to the fact that on the most pressing geopolitical matters, like war in Ukraine or the Middle East, Brazil is simply not very important. 

Lula should stop pretending that it is, and concentrate on matters closer to home.