MICHAEL MAYALO
“A wind has been blowing from the West; now it will begin to blow from the East.”
While travelling in China, this quote by Chairperson Mao Zedong came to mind after hearing the election results from Brazil.
The presidential triumph of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is a victory for both Brazil and for BRICS.
Coming hot on the heels of the re-election of the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, the Lula Moment 2.0 accelerates the evolution in the change of the domestic politics of the BRICS member countries back to the progressive politics of a decade ago when the group was formed.
In his 2018 presidential election campaign, outgoing and right-wing Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, promised to “liberate Brazil from the ideology of its international relations that it subjected Brazil to in recent years.”
Clearly referring to the BRICS group, Bolsonaro was going to break with the international role that Brazil had begun to craft for itself under Lula and his immediate predecessor but protégé of Lula, Dilma Rouseff.
When the BRICS group was formed in 2009, then excluding South Africa, Lula represented Brazil while Dmitry Medvedev, then president, represented Russia, Manmohan Singh, then prime minister, represented India and Hu Jintoa, then president, represented China.
Medvedev is a close collaborator of the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Therefore, while the politics of China and Russia remained consistent over the past thirteen years, since that first BRICS Summit in Yekaterinburg, Brazil went right with Bolsonaro, India went right as well as the election of the BJP’s Narendra Modi and even in South Africa, the ANC elected capitalist and mining tycoon, Cyril Ramaphosa.
The Neo-liberal domestic politics of the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) bloc within BRICS affected the direction of the group to the extent that Ramaphosa wasted no time upon his election as president of South Africa in 2018 in instructing his then-minister of international relations and cooperation, Lindiwe Sisulu, to reconvene the IBSA meeting of foreign affairs ministers in June 2018.
On a side-line of the meeting of BRICS foreign affairs ministers, Minister Sisulu found it necessary to resurrect IBSA when the forum had folded into BRICS when South Africa joined the group in 2010.
Yet, Bolsonaro, Modi and Ramaphosa, though initially moving their countries’ foreign policy back to the West, soon realised that they were not going to be taken seriously by the West.
While Bolsonaro found it easier to scoff his northern neighbour, Venezuela, and thereby attempt to curry favour with Washington, it was a bit more difficult for him to adopt the same attitude towards China.
Brazil remains China’s most strategic and important trade partner in Latin America.
In the aftermath of his election both as ANC president and president of South Africa, Ramaphosa soon jetted off to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). A meeting that had been mostly missed by his predecessor.
It would not be far-fetched to suggest that one of Ramaphosa’s biggest regrets was that he neither hosted Donald Trump nor the American president ever hosting him. However, it is safe to assume that his brother-in-law spoke on his behalf when Patrice Motsepe declared to the former US president that “Africans love you, Mr President.”
Both Bolsonaro and Modi were enamoured by Trump. Elections in India happens, as in South Africa, in 2024 again.
The election of Lula again to the Brazilian presidency should provide impetus to the ANC in relooking at the global politics and the choice that it makes in December. Hopefully, ANC delegates will feel the progressive wind, starting in the east, blowing again through Brazil and ensure that the progressive wind of change blows through South Africa and then moves on to India.
Mayalo is the Youth Business Chain Executive Chairperson. He writes in his capacity.