There is no love lost between Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Argentina’s President Javier Milei, who are still yet to meet, and their political convictions and foreign policy priorities, for the most part, diverge. Their speeches at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) might have been expected to differ markedly. But, albeit for very different reasons, they both devoted much of their speeches to the same thing: criticising the UN.
Comparing the speeches that President Lula made at the opening of the UNGA general debates in 2023 and 2024, the key points were not dissimilar. Lula’s rhetoric at diplomatic forums tends to go through a checklist of Brazilian foreign policy priorities – addressing the effects of climate change, reducing global inequality, and empowering the developing economies of the Global South, among other goals. However, the tone of his speech on 24 September this year was much bleaker regarding the progress of these goals.
In September 2023, nine months after taking office for a third time, Lula repeated phrases such as “Brazil is back”. As with several domestic policy areas, Lula’s foreign policy in his third term conveys a sense of nostalgia for his previous presidential terms (2003-2011). In 2024, on the other hand, the hopeful message of ‘Brazil is back’ was not repeated. Instead, Lula made negative comments such as “we are living in a moment of rising anguish, frustrations, tensions, and fear”; “we have witnessed an alarming escalation of geopolitical disputes and strategic rivalries”; “[the world] is tired of neglected goals to reduce carbon emissions”; and “hurricanes in the Caribbean, typhoons in Asia, droughts and floods in Africa, and torrential rains in Europe are leaving a trail of death and destruction”.
Referring to climate-related disasters in Brazil, Lula highlighted that this year the south of Brazil has suffered its worst floods since 1941 and the Amazon region is experiencing its worst drought in over four decades. Lula said that his government has “done a lot” to address the climate crisis, but “we know that there is more to be done”.
Lula criticised the seeming paralysis of the UN to act, which he said reflected a “weakening of our collective capacity for negotiation and dialogue”. He also bemoaned the lack of ambition in the new UN ‘Pact for the Future’, which contains a list of commitments to address global challenges and reform multilateral institutions, including the UN Security Council (UNSC). “Its...limited scope is also an expression of the paradox of our time: we go around in circles between possible compromises that lead to insufficient results,” he argued. Lula proposed a “comprehensive review” of the UN Charter and urgent reforms within the UN itself.
For his part, Milei also directed a diatribe against the UN. In his first speech at the UNGA on 24 September, Milei, like Lula, took aim at the ‘Pact for the Future’. Unlike Lula, however, Milei criticised it for going way too far. Milei said the UN had become “a model of supranational government, with international bureaucrats attempting to impose on…its members…and citizens of the world a specific way of living”, adding that “an organisation that was born to defend the rights of man has become one of the main proponents of systematic violations of freedom”. He dismissed the UN’s 2030 Agenda as “collectivist policies” and the ‘Pact for the Future’ as “going further down this tragic path”, cautioning that this “woke agenda is coming up against reality”.
Domestic disappointment
While Milei gave short shrift to climate change and ruled out working in concert with the international community to address it, Lula highlighted it as the great challenge of our times and criticised the lack of international coordination to combat it. However, lots of reports and column inches in the Brazilian press were devoted to criticising Lula for seeking to hold other countries to account even though his own government has not lived up to the green ambitions he claims to prioritise. While the current Lula government is a better custodian of the Amazon rainforest than the administration of his far-right predecessor Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023), a Milei ally, Lula and his ruling left-wing Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) have a record of pushing for economic growth to the detriment of environmental considerations.
“It is time to confront the debate about the slow pace of decarbonisation,” Lula said on 24 September, also highlighting that Brazil has one of the world’s “cleanest” energy grids, with around 90% of electricity in the country coming from renewable sources. But despite Brazil’s immense potential for renewable energy, the country remains a major oil exporter, and the Lula government is reportedly backing plans to boost fossil fuel production.
At an oil industry conference in Rio de Janeiro on 23 September, Brazil’s mining and energy minister, Alexandre Silveira, said that “we cannot and will not give up on realising the country’s true oil potential”. Silveira also said that the government “wants to rigorously comply with all environmental legislation and is almost at the final phase to further the possibility of…identifying our riches in the equatorial margin”.
Silveira was referring to a controversial plan which exposed tensions in the Lula government last year – an application by the state-controlled oil giant Petrobras to explore oil near the Foz da Amazonas, the mouth of the Amazon River. The application was rejected by the federal environment regulator (Ibama) in May last year on the grounds that the oil company’s application was missing a piece of paperwork, a sediment analysis (AAAS) of the proposed exploration area. Silveira’s recent comments that Petrobras is almost ready to re-submit its application to drill for oil in the ecologically sensitive waters off its northern coasts could further undermine the government’s green credentials.
Push for EU deal
Another issue where Brazil and Argentina are on the same page is the long-delayed trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). President Lula held bilateral meetings with the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von der Leyen, and other leaders of EU countries, such as France’s President Emmanuel Macron, on the sidelines of the UNGA, as he re-launched his efforts to convince European leaders to back the agreement. The Argentine government has also expressed support for the revitalisation of the stalled negotiations. And Uruguayan presidential hopeful Yamandú Orsi recently pledged to prioritise the EU-Mercosur trade talks if he wins election.
Security Council reform
Before the start of the UNGA general debate, Lula attended the ‘Summit for the Future’ on 22 September, where the UN adopted the ‘Pact for the Future’ aimed at transforming global governance. Although the declaration’s pledges did not provide detail on what the changes would be, the document signalled an intention to give countries from “underrepresented” regions a seat at the UNSC. Another pledge was to “intensify efforts to reach an agreement on the future of the veto”, a power afforded to the five permanent members of the council – the US, UK, France, China, and Russia. Lula and several previous Brazilian presidents have called for these changes to the UNSC and pushed for Brazil to become a permanent member.
