Former Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim was interviewed by Sputnik on the policy of a new Lula government, should Lula defeat current President Jair Bolsonaro in next year’s presidential elections. Amorim was Foreign Minister twice: once under President Itamar Franco in 1993-1994, and then under Lula from 2003-2010, and he is known to be still close to Lula.
Amorim stressed that Brazil, like many countries, is going through a systemic crisis. “We are in the midst of the pandemic, a big health crisis, a big economic crisis, a big potential social crisis, also.” The old models no longer work, he said; they have been “overcome, surpassed. So, there’s a new world.”
He then turned to the BRICS, and the kinds of major changes that could come. “I think that [given] the fact that we have BRICS, for instance, we have the possibility, Russia has just proposed, I saw my good friend [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov, with whom I interacted for many years as foreign minister and before as ambassador to the UN, proposing that Russia could abandon the dollar.”
Amorim added: “I don’t know if Brazil can abandon the dollar, but we could have our trade among BRICS countries with our currencies. So I think it’s very important to reinforce BRICS. I think Brazil has to work within the groups like BRICS and, of course, to have normal relations with the United States, as well.”
Asked if Washington would tolerate another Lula term, he responded: “Washington is not such a simple concept. There are different forces in the United States that act in different ways. Certainly, if you had the Trump administration, they would support Bolsonaro. With the Biden administration – we don’t know yet. So far, his policies toward Latin America have not shown much progress.”
As for the policy priorities of a Lula government, Amorim said that, in addition to the BRICS, “We’ll work on integration in South America, and we’ll develop multi-polar relations with all the world, with great emphasis in Africa, because Africa is very near to Brazil.”
