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Brazil’s role at the heart of an expanded and more authoritarian-dominated BRICS is part of Lula’s increasingly incoherent foreign policy. 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, and that the strikes were a “violation of Iran’s sovereignty and international law”. This strength of language put Brazil at odds with all other Western democracies, which either supported the strikes or merely expressed concern.
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, and that the strikes were a “violation of Iran's sovereignty and international law”. This strength of language put Brazil at odds with all other 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, China, Russia and South Africa, holds its annual 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 had offered Brazil a platform from which to exert global influence. Now it makes Brazil look increasingly 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 the Fundação Getulio Vargas, a university in São Paulo.
Brazil's diplomats are trying to get around the problem by focusing the summit on innocuous themes: co-operation on vaccines and health care; the green-energy transition; and maintaining most-favoured nation status as the basis for international trade, in which countries treat all members of the World Trade Organisation equally. They want to avoid chat on a subject America's president, Donald Trump, particularly hates: a BRICS-led effort to settle trade in local currencies rather than the dollar. Brazil's diplomats would probably prefer it if the Iranians stayed quiet, too. “We are in a moment of damage containment more than a moment of creating new instruments,” says a senior Brazilian diplomat.
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 trade ties. In March he visited Japan, which imports most of its beef from the United States, to push Brazilian meat as a substitute. His ministers have been meeting with Chinese bureaucrats to discuss ways to increase Brazilian agricultural imports, probably at the expense of American ones.
But this comes with grandiose efforts which far outrun Brazil's weight on the world stage. In May Lula was the only leader of a big democracy to attend Moscow's commemorations of the end of the second world war. He used the trip to try to convince Mr 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 assumed office for the third time, in 2023, he embraced Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela's autocrat, despite the country having become a full-fledged dictatorship. (The relationship only soured after Mr Maduro overtly stole another election last year.) Having led the UN mission to stabilise Haiti after an earthquake tore the country apart in 2010, Brazil now stays mum as Haiti collapses into a gangster-run hellscape. Lula appears unwilling or unable to rally Latin American nations to present a united front against Mr Trump's migrant deportations and tariff war.
Weakness on the world stage is compounded by Lula's slipping popularity at home. During his first two terms as president, from 2003 to 2010, Brazil reaped the rewards of a commodity boom, and he was one of the most popular leaders in the world. His domestic strength lent him credibility abroad, and many of his peers saw him as a figurehead for fast-developing economies.
Now, though, Lula is increasingly unpopular in Brazil. The country has shifted to the right. Many Brazilians associate his Workers Party with corruption, due to a scandal that landed him in jail for over a year (his conviction was later annulled). He built the party on support from trade unions, socially-minded Catholics and poor recipients of government handouts. But today Brazil is a country where evangelical Christianity is booming, where employment in agriculture and the gig economy is growing fast, and where the right offers handouts too.
Lula's personal approval ratings hover around 40%, the lowest of any point during his three terms. Only 28% of Brazilians say they approve of his government. On June 25th Congress humiliated him by rejecting a decree he had passed to raise new taxes. It was the first time in more than 30 years that lawmakers had overturned an executive decree, and will leave the government with less fiscal space for spending ahead of next year's general election.
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 to lead the right. 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 with him than Lula. Yet he has said almost nothing about Brazil since taking office in January. In part, 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 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 because Brazil, relatively distant and geopolitically inert, simply does not matter that much when it comes to questions of war in Ukraine or the Middle East. Lula should stop pretending that it does, and concentrate on matters closer to home.
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