When Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro arrives in Delhi in January 2020, as the chief guest for the annual Republic Day celebrations, he will try to build new bridges with India. This will no longer be the old story of India and Brazil as two liberal powers of the Global South, that represent the voice of the developing world at the WTO, United Nations and other multilateral arrangements.
Bolsonaro now means business, reflecting his vision of an aggressive market economy and transactional bilateralism. It is no coincidence that he has been called the “Trump of the Tropics” and he is likely to find some fertile ground while dealing with Modi and his populism. “At present, Brazil has a president who openly sympathises with anti-globalists of the radical right” wrote the renowned Brazilian political analyst Celso Rocha de Barros when referring to the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, in March 2019.
Ernesto Araújo, Bolsonaro’s minister of foreign affairs, hit the same key in his appointment speech: “We will fight to reverse globalism and push it back to its point of departure”. Araújo made clear his government meant a tipping point in the traditional diplomacy of the largest country in Latin America. He exalted the importance of valuing patriotism and placing the needs of the “nation” above “global” demands. “Remembering the homeland is not remembering the international liberal order, it is not remembering the global order. We’re not here to work on the global order. This is Brazil. Don’t be afraid to be Brazil,” he emphasized.
Re-orienting Brazil: Bolsonaro soon put these words in practice, and roamed the world questioning the legitimacy of international organisations and multilateral agreements. Right after being sworn in as President, he informed the United Nations about the withdrawal of Brazil from the Global Pact on Migration, a clear sign against multilateralism. In January 2019 at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland, he focused his speech on attracting investors and foreign partners, but conveniently left out references to multilateralism or any vision for the future of the WTO.
However, Bolsonaro’s anti-globalisation obsession has also exposed incongruities, with his nationalist and protectionist foreign policy sometimes clashing with the ultra-liberal economic pragmatism of Finance Minister Paulo Guedes. This was already apparent most recently in the decision whether to strike a Mercosur trade deal with the European Union, jointly with Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay.
But Bolsonaro has treaded on, whether in resetting relations with the United States, or pragmatically looking towards China as an alternative to the Western economies and already the destination of 25% of Brazilian exports. He made his first official visit to China and concluded important trade agreements, as well as guaranteed Chinese investments to privatize a good part of Brazil’s state-owned companies. In November 2019, shortly after his participation in the 11th BRICS Summit meeting in Brasilia, President Xi Jinping announced a $100 billion investment fund to be created for infrastructure projects in Brazil. China intends to make $15 billion available immediately, as soon as Brazil can secure its own $5 billion stake.
Priority or Illusion India?: With the American, European, and Chinese outreach concluded, Bolsonaro has now set his eyes on India. And there is much that the two countries now share. In terms of nationalism, political moment, and socio-economic profiles, Brazil and India seem quite similar.
Bolsonaro’s strategic framework for his talks with Modi will likely focus on trade and investments. Both leaders will also likely agree that multilateralism as it exists does not deserve much more efforts and investments. But this does not mean that all will be easy. To start with, India is facing a severe economic slowdown, and it is unlikely that Bolsonaro will find much appetite among Indian public and private companies to invest in Brazil. He may leave India disappointed, at least compared with his big deals in China. On trade, the sugar dispute may further escalate as Brazilian producers accuse India of protectionist practices.
Both countries are also coming under increasing international pressure for the illiberal policies at home. “Brazil and India face the same problem. Since the last decade of the 20th century, the two countries, although they have decreased poverty, they have increased their socio-economic inequalities,” says Marcos Formiga, an economist, professor at the University of Brasilia UnB. He notes that “these immense inequalities threaten the stability of two of the world’s greatest democracies.”
So it is questionable whether there will be a long-term commitment to make the relationship work beyond the uncertain chemistry and ideological alignment of Bolsonaro and Modi. “In the last decade, despite India’s economic growth and geostrategic salience, the foreign policy agendas of the two countries have actually not converged. And despite claims by Brazilian diplomacy that India is a priority in Brazil’s projection in Asia, India practically is still not a priority for Brazil,” cautions Marcondes M. de Araújo of the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communications.
There may be interesting new deals shaping up between Brazil and India in terms of investment protection, science and technology exchanges, and defence cooperation. But in the current state of world disorder, Bolsonaro and Modi are unlikely to strike a new global vision, at least one as bold as the South-South democratic partnership that their predecessors Lula da Silva and Manmohan Singh developed.
(The writer is the president of the Lusophone Society of Goa.)
