Reporters accosted Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as he arrived in Canada for the G7 summit Monday afternoon with such questions as “should Russia be brought back into the G7?” Lula’s response was to question if the G7 still has any relevance at all. “After the G20, deep down, there is no need for the G7. The G20 has more human density, more economic density,” and Putin attends that, he remarked. The G7 has become a “cultural issue… where the rich cousins meet,” he added, and then quipped that he attends so it can’t be said that he refuses to go to “the rich people’s party.” Lula, India’s Narendra Modi and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa were the three BRICS leaders invited this year.
Then, when addressing the expanded G7 session of the summit, he raised the elephant in the room of world affairs: the vacuum of leadership.
Lula spoke of the wars and conflicts accumulating year after year and the $2.7 trillion dollars wasted on military spending. He named, in particular: the indiscriminate killing and use of hunger as a weapon of war in Gaza, while there are still countries which “resist recognizing the Palestinian state, which shows their selectivity in defending law and justice;” the continuing war in Ukraine which requires dialogue to end; “Israel’s recent attacks on Iran [which] threaten to turn the Middle East into a single battlefield, with inestimable global consequences;” and the international community’s indifference to the “atrocities perpetrated by organized crime” in Haiti.
