Brazil reaches out to Africa to expand relations with the Global South
Matías Mongan, Gate Center collaborator and PhD student at Universidad Nacional La Plata, Argentina.
As in his first two terms in office (2003-2011), Lula da Silva seeks to strengthen diplomatic ties with African countries in order to expand Brazil’s capacity of influence in the “Global South”. In view of this objective, the president has made several visits to the continent in recent months in which he has highlighted the deep cultural ties between Brazil and Africa and has urged to deepen bilateral trade exchange.
At the same time, he intends to increase Brazil’s diplomatic presence in the region and has promoted various cooperation projects in areas such as agriculture and health, although with a different approach to that adopted in the first decade of the 21st century, when Lula sought to turn African countries into an incipient market for internationalized Brazilian companies.
Despite the President’s characteristic voluntarism and his pretension to become a spokesman for African governments, both within the G20 and the BRICS (where Brazil currently holds the pro-tempore presidency of the organization), foreign policy towards Africa faces a series of internal and external constraints that limit the Lula government’s margin for international action on the continent.
Brazil’s interest in Africa: between universalism and autonomy
According to Tullo Vigevani (2008), the two main guidelines that have historically guided Brazilian foreign policy are autonomy and universalism. While autonomy is understood as the room for maneuver that the country can have in its relationship with other states and in the international system, universalism is based on the idea that Brazil must be able to establish diplomatic ties with all governments, regardless of their geographic location, political regime or economic program, in order to expand its autonomy and consolidate its status as a global actor.
In contrast to autonomy, universalism has been present in foreign policy intermittently, for example in the governments of Jânio Quadros and João Goulart (1961-1964) or Ernesto Geisel (1974-1979), in the midst of the dictatorship. As for the latter, in addition to reestablishing diplomatic relations with China on August 15, 1974, the following year the de facto regime recognized the independence of the communist governments of Mozambique and Angola (Brazil being the first country to do so), despite being aligned with the anti-subversive struggle against communism promoted by the United States (US) at the time.
The first two Lula da Silva administrations took up the legacy of the Geisel government’s foreign policy and accentuated the universalist character of Brazilian diplomacy based on the so-called “autonomy through diversification” model (Vigevani and Cepaluni 2007). This policy emphasizes South-South cooperation and the promotion of political-trade agreements with non-traditional partners (such as African countries), as these would help reduce asymmetries with more developed countries (USA, European Union) and increase the country’s international negotiating capacity.
These diplomatic ties also served as an instrument to open new markets for “internationalized” Brazilian companies (Odebrecht, Camargo Correa, OAS, to name a few) that began to operate in different African countries in the framework of the countless new cooperation agreements in Lula’s first terms of office and thanks to the financial backing provided by institutions such as the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social, BNDES (Cervo 2010, Actis 2016). This situation led to an increase in trade exchange between Brazil and Africa from US$ 6 billion in 2003 to US$ 25.6 billion in 2012 (Vinícius de Freitas, 2016).
During Dilma Rousseff’s administration (2011-2016), Brazilian exports to Africa were concentrated in countries such as Egypt, South Africa, Angola, Nigeria, Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Ghana, Tunisia and Senegal. However, Lula’s successor decided to dismantle the bureaucratic structure created under the “autonomy through diversification” model on the grounds that its economic and political costs outweighed its benefits (Gomes Saraiva and Bom Gomes 2016). In addition to the fact that the corruption scandal generated as a result of the “Lava Jato” judicial process, initiated in March 2014, directly put in crisis the foreign policy paradigm prevailing until then and marked the end of the tacit alliance between Itamaraty and the “internationalized” Brazilian companies. Thus, the Brazilian government began to close part of the embassies opened in Africa during the previous period and adopted a reactive foreign policy on the continent.
The government of Michel Temer (2016-2019) limited the universalist profile of foreign policy (Actis 2018) and, therefore, diplomatic ties with African countries. This dynamic would be further accentuated during the government of Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022) who did not travel to Africa during his entire term and closed the embassies in Malawi, Liberia and Sierra Leone (reopened by the Lula government in November 2023). This would end up hurting trade between Brazil and African countries: in 2009 Brazilian exports to Africa accounted for 5.7% of the total and in 2023, when Lula returned to the presidency, they reached only 3.9% of trade (Osborn, 2024).
Brazil’s return to Africa
One of the main priorities of the third Lula da Silva administration is to recover Brazil’s international power of attraction after the relative international isolation during the Bolsonaro administration. In view of this objective, universalism once again became a guiding axis of Brazilian foreign policy, on the other hand an active proselytism was promoted in multilateral forums in order to, in line with the paradigm of “autonomy through participation” (Fonseca Jr. 1998), influence the process of elaboration of international governance rules and in parallel try to present Brazil as a spokesman for the countries of the “Global South”. And, according to President Lula da Silva himself, “there can be no ‘Global South without Africa’.
The president took advantage of the pro-tempore presidency of the G20 until 2024 to launch the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, which has already been signed by 91 countries (including 26 African countries) and aims to strengthen multilateral policies to eradicate hunger and poverty in line with the targets set by the Sustainable Development Goals (goals 1, 2 and 10). To consolidate the partnership, the Brazilian president deepened diplomatic ties with African countries through visits to South Africa, Angola, Cape Verde, Egypt and Ethiopia, where he participated as a guest at the 37th African Union (AU) Summit in February 2024. In turn, Lula received in Brazil, between 2023 and 2024, the Prime Minister of Cape Verde, Ulisses Correia e Silva, the President of Benin, Patrice Talon, and the President of Angola, João Lourenço, who participated, at Lula’s invitation, in the G-20 Summit.
The main objective of re-establishing relations with Africa is to increase trade: “It makes no sense that a country with 200 million inhabitants, such as Brazil, has trade relations with Ethiopia, a BRICS country with 126 million inhabitants, and our trade flow is only US$ 23 million. Even with Egypt, with whom we have the largest trade balance in Africa, it reached US$ 2.8 billion. This is insufficient for a country that aspires to have global influence” (Rodrigues 2024), lamented Lula at the end of the AU summit held between February 17 and 18, 2024. At that meeting, the president also informed his peers of his intention to restructure and forgive part of the US$ 280 million debt owed to Brazil by countries such as Ghana, Mozambique and Senegal, among others. Lula wants to urge other creditors to do the same (Osborn, 2024), a task he will now carry out in the framework of his role as president pro-tempore of the BRICS.
Limits to Brazil’s African foreign policy
On repeated occasions, Lula has made clear his intention to promote an expansive foreign policy in Africa and, within this framework, to reissue the public-private partnership that characterized the “autonomy through diversification” model. To this end, at the end of 2023 the government submitted to Congress a bill authorizing the BNDES to finance the production and commercialization of goods and services destined for the foreign market (Agência Câmara de Notícias 2024). An attribute that was suspended from it in 2017 as a consequence of the corruption scandal and subsequent “Lava Jato” judicial process (Machado 2024).
However, this new policy faces a series of internal and external constraints that limit Brazil’s margin for international action on the African continent.
The first conditioning factor is economic and political. Unlike his first two terms in office, when Brazil grew at 4.1% annually (Mongan 2015) and the opposition Workers’ Party (PT) had little chance of blocking his initiatives in Parliament, the Brazilian economy has only in recent years managed to leave behind the marked economic recession it suffered between 2014 and 2020 (when per capita gross domestic product contracted by 1.44% annually). With fewer resources than in previous years, it seems difficult for the Lula government to be able to support long-term cooperation policies on the African continent. In addition, the country remains politically polarized and the parliamentary benches that support former president Jair Bolsonaro will do everything possible to prevent the return of a foreign policy that they consider ideologized, in addition to favoring corruption.
The second conditioning factor is also of a material nature. Brazil has a highly professionalized diplomacy, besides being the most important in all of Latin America, but lacks the necessary resources to expand its international presence in a continent as geographically vast as Africa. Furthermore, Itamaraty (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) has traditionally prioritized diplomatic ties with the US, Europe and more recently with China, and has only sought to reach out to Africa in specific historical periods: “To get an idea, Brazil has 94 diplomats in France and Switzerland alone, while in the entire African continent it has only 84” (Assis, 2024).of the 35 Brazilian embassies in Africa, only 14 (40%) are headed by an ambassador, the rest by counselors, ministers or secretaries. In addition, a total of ten diplomatic posts have only one official in charge: Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Benin, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Gabon, Togo, Equatorial Guinea and Burkina Faso. These limitations make it difficult to strengthen diplomatic ties with these countries, some of which are also currently suffering from internal armed conflicts.
The third conditioning factor is of an international nature. Brazil cannot compete diplomatically and economically with China in Africa. An example of this is that the trade exchange of African governments with the Asian giant reached 243 billion dollars in 2023, while with Brazil it only reached 21 billion dollars (APEX 2023). Xi Jinping’s government has turned the African continent into one of its main spheres of international influence, to such an extent that at the last 2024 summit of the Forum for China-Africa Cooperation it committed to allocate 51 billion dollars within three years for the implementation of various cooperation programs on the continent in areas ranging from trade, industry and the digital sector (Xinhua 2024).
Therefore, the Lula government needs to develop a new scheme of international insertion in Africa that does not only emphasize the commercial aspect or the cultural affinities that exist between Brazil and African countries, an approach that Mourão (1994) calls “cultural diplomacy”. In this sense, diplomatic discourse should place more emphasis on the future and less on the historical legacy of slavery, especially considering the potentialities that Africa currently has: “a young continent, open to new technologies and with a huge consumer market” (Assis, 2024). One of the main challenges ahead will be to develop a specific diplomatic program for the African continent that will be maintained over time to prevent political changes from affecting diplomatic ties and to strengthen relations with the “Global South”, regardless of the presidents in office.