Major economies in the developed world will hold their summit on Friday, with an agenda that includes pandemic response, growth recovery and the environment.
This year, the G7 has chosen to repeat what is already a tradition and invite allies. But he left President Jair Bolsonaro out of the house, thwarting the Brazilian government’s plans to get closer to rich countries.
At the event hosted by the British government, the G7 (made up of Canada, UK, Italy, Japan, France, USA and Germany) invited India, South Korea and Australia.
Two years ago, in France, President Emmanuel Macron invited partners and emerging countries during the G7 summit. But, again, Brazil was left out. Paris chose to connect with Chile, Egypt, South Africa, Senegal, India and Rwanda.
In 2020, Bolsonaro announced that Donald Trump had invited him to the summit, which would be organized in the United States. But the pandemic and the Republicans’ electoral defeat have forced the White House to reconsider the event.
The absence of the world’s largest economies from the agenda has become frustrating for the Brazilian government, which has shown since coming to power that its goal has been to align the interests of the West. Part of the strategy still involves joining the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
Meanwhile, the Brazilian government has vacated Mercosur, fragmented alliances in South America, moved away from projects in Africa and started to diminish the leadership of the BRICS.
But the expected convergence with rich economies did not materialize as expected and Brazil was left off the negotiating table.
In the G7, if the absence of China is due to a strategic and geopolitical issue, then the situation in Brazil is interpreted in the diplomatic sphere as a sign of the country’s loss of international standing and the resistance of rich countries to accepting the presence of Bolsonaro at the negotiating table. .
Brazil’s first real participation in the events of advanced economies occurred in 2003, when then-President Jacques Chirac invited the country and other emerging countries to the Evian Summit, which was known at the time as the Group of Eight.
Brazil was part of the 2005 events in Scotland. In 2006, Angela Merkel again invited Brazil to the summit she was organizing, which was repeated the following year in Japan and in 2008 in Italy.
As of 2009, due to the global economic crisis, the G20 has occupied the space that belongs to the G7. With emerging economies turning into a new engine of global growth, one of the BRICS goals was to remove the political weight of the G7 and transfer the role of global manager to the new group.
At that moment, the then Foreign Minister, Celso Amorim, said that “the G8 is dead.” “It no longer represents anything,” he said. “I don’t know how the funeral will be, sometimes the funeral is slow.”
“Today, by any standards, economies such as China, Brazil and India are important economies that have a greater impact on the global economy than many of the G8 countries,” he said.
From that moment on, Brazil began to distance itself from the G8, but through deliberate action on the part of the government.
The scenario changes radically with the end of the Dilma Rousseff government. But the temporary nature of Michel Temer’s government did not give the country the right to return to the table of the greats.
When Bolsonaro finally took power, his foreign policy was aimed at persuading Americans and Europeans to treat Brazil as a Western ally and with liberal economic projects. But, for now at least, the Brazilian president is still out of the debate.
In 2022, his last chance will depend on an invitation from Germany, the country that will chair the G7 next year.
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