BRICS leaders meet at G20 Summit, 15 Nov 2015 in Antalya, Turkey. President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff, Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, President of Chine Xi Jinping and South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma. (Photo: GCIS). Source: Government of South Africa
The latest BRICS+ summit, hosted by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Rio de Janeiro on July 6 and 7, 2025, did not make international headlines. And rightly so, as it failed to make much of an impression. It was even a rather gloomy shadow theater.
The more the BRICS expands, the more it seems to dissolve into incoherence. We remember that the BRIC first welcomed South Africa, then, becoming the BRICS+, Iran, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, and Indonesia, with Saudi Arabia remaining hesitant to give its answer. Ankara quickly realized, after some procrastination, that it was not in its interest to join. But who was present at this last meeting? Neither Putin, who is under an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes and was replaced by Lavrov, who is not yet under arrest, nor Xi Jinping for the first time since coming to power in 2012, having become indifferent to this kind of gathering—we will come back to this—or weakened according to certain unconfirmed hypotheses, nor the leaders of the Middle East, for obvious scheduling reasons.
Lula may well make grand professions of faith in the so-called Global South, which the BRICS+ are far from being able to legitimately represent, but the reality of his words deceives no one. He was able to develop at leisure his vision of a multi-polar world, which has become a fig leaf for the right to oppress against a backdrop of criticism of a supposedly Western universalism. He took the liberty of warmly greeting Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who heads the diplomacy of a state responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. He denounced what he called the arms race led by NATO without mentioning, as expected, the origin of this response. He easily opposed Trump’s tariffs, but we are far from a common response from the BRICS+. In short, he set up a Potemkin village. The summit did not even result in a declaration of principles, even if it was a sham, attempting to present a few attractive resolutions, but a catalog from a parallel universe. Propaganda is not what it used to be!
Some analysts, however, see the BRICS+ as a counter-alliance to the global West. This view is short-sighted. The lesson is precisely that there is no alliance, in the strong sense of the term, in opposition alone. The BRICS+ countries are more divided than united on most issues, but many of them mostly inconsistent.