The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) opened its 79th Session on Tuesday with the annual addresses by heads of government or their proxies, a time-honored political showplace for Latin America’s presidents. Brazilian President Lula da Silva, following U.N. tradition, spoke first and praised his own government for its efforts to preserve the Amazon but spoke of a world “weary of neglected carbon emission reduction targets and of financial aid to poor countries that never arrives” from rich countries. Lula also criticized Israel for practicing “collective punishment” in Gaza and promoted a Chinese initiative to force Ukraine to halt its own defense against Russia’s 2022 invasion of its territory. Colombian President Gustavo Petro spoke shortly after Lula, and devoted much of his address to excoriating Israel and repeating his doomsday warnings from his 2023 UNGA speech about “human extinction” that were heavy on ideological slogans but short on practical or coherent solutions.
What is underneath?
The opening of UNGA is a habitual pilgrimage from Latin American capitals where leaders get the equal chance to score important political points on a giant global stage. There is a two-point test to judge whether a leader has succeeded at UNGA: (1) did their speech advance their political agenda at home; and (2) did they achieve relevant insertion into the ranks of the top international issues of concern?
By all accounts, Lula and Petro failed on both points this year.
Lula went into this speech on his back foot politically in Brazil, where his left-wing coalition appears headed for major defeats in the country’s important municipal elections on October 6. His speech opened on the Gaza conflict before getting to what many expected to be Brazil’s signature issue — climate change, and preservation of the Amazon. Lula once again stressed how much Brazil has done in contrast to a laggard rich world that is really to blame for the problem through greenhouse gas emissions and hoarding its wealth.
But the political failures of Lula’s own government have been on graphic display for much of Brazil’s citizens in recent weeks. Massive, out-of-control wildfires have consumed tens of thousands of square miles of drought-plagued territory throughout the country, sending choking smoke into densely populated areas for weeks. Lula made a veiled accusation at the neglectful rich world for the drought, while not acknowledging that his Worker’s Party (PT)-led government allowed a labor strike at the federal environmental protection agency Ibama drag on for six months as the wildfire threat escalated and the agency’s ability to fight fires was put on hold.
Indeed, as Lula chided the rich world for its allegedly stingy lending practices, his own government held out against the Ibama labor union’s wage demands because it had “reached the maximum limit, from a budgetary point of view, of what it can offer.” Brazil’s federal budget tops out at around US$700 billion annually and its debt is mostly in its own currency.
On the international front, Lula’s co-branding of the “Chinese-Brazilian initiative” on Ukraine smacked of toadyism towards Beijing, not to mention appeasement of Russia. The six-point “common understanding” announced in May was widely viewed as a naked attempt to give political cover to developing economies to avoid fulsome support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and defense. The initiative not only benefits China’s ally in Moscow, but could help plot its own geopolitical tactics in the event of a similar attack on Taiwan. Lula’s decision to lend Brazil’s good name to this ploy has baffled even his own career diplomats. Including it in his speech further weakened Brazil’s influence and credibility this week.
Petro’s address went much further off the mark. Almost none of the speech by the country’s first leftist president could seem relevant to the average Colombian citizen, as Petro used the stage mostly to vent his ex-guerrilla spleen over his apparently intensifying hatred of Israel. Indeed, aside from a passing reference to Colombia’s “beauty and butterflies”, any domestic issue was completely ignored in his speech.
As far as international relevance, Petro fulminated so broadly against “the global oligarchy” and “the extinction of life” that it was unclear to most anyone in the hall what he was talking about in practical terms. It was a missed opportunity for Petro to position Colombia as a relevant voice on climate change ahead of the UN COP16 meeting being held in Cali next month. The lack of substance or tangible proposals in his speech did little to distract from real concerns over the logistical and security challenges that Colombia faces as the host of the upcoming conference.
On the one international issue where Colombia’s position is highly relevant - the stealing of the July 28 presidential election in neighboring Venezuela by the regime of President Nicolas Maduro - Petro was silent. He did accuse the “global oligarchy” of “completely abandoning the ideals of liberty and democracy” while imposing a “blockade” on Venezuela, but said nothing of the extinction of democracy, liberty and lives happening next door at the hands of Maduro’s regime. His obsessive attacks on Israel didn’t spare the reminders of his promotion of antisemitic tropes over social media, and was delivered to a mostly empty hall which returned little applause.
Our take:
The failure of the two-pronged test of a successful UNGA speech should be laid entirely at the feet of Lula and Petro personally. Each is without a governing majority in his respective Congress so they both had everything to gain and little to lose in delivering a detailed policy speech aimed at domestic audiences. They had a chance to reboot and go on the political offensive at home and abroad, but didn’t take it.
In Lula’s case, the Brazilian president seems to be genuinely struggling to understand the world as it is today. His enthusiasm for initiatives that harm Brazil’s diplomatic prestige suggest he is increasingly retreating into an informational and analytical bubble in Brasilia rather than sounding out Brazil’s democratic allies. Observers point to an ever-decreasing circle of advisers who have fewer channels to the emerging centers of influence in the West. He may also be carrying deep personal scars from the corruption scandals that brought down the PT in 2016 and landed him in prison, making him less trusting of outside opinions and more insular in his thinking.
Petro’s peculiarities, however, are a central feature of his presidency. All three of his UNGA speeches have been this strange and high-flying, but this year’s address was particularly disconnected from the country he governs. His low approval ratings and inability to get much done on policy at home seems not to affect his political judgment. UNGA is simply a souped-up version of his social media accounts, making it another place to expound on his dark perspective of a doomed world instead of the nuanced and demanding job of addressing Colombia’s problems with crime, drug trafficking, anemic economic growth and fiscal strain.
In the end, neither president should be seen as a reflection of the country he leads. That would be unfair. Colombia is a modern democracy that is eager to emerge as an economic power without the taint of ideological extremism from either end of the spectrum. Petro seems like an almost accidental president in contrast, with his hateful and cynical pessimism not at all reflective of the country’s aspirations.
Brazil is also a dynamic country with an extraordinarily resilient entrepreneurial class that manages to overcome some of the most ridiculous structural impediments to success imaginable. It also has a huge amount of wealth and abundant resources to tackle its own problems as well as the challenges of defending the Amazon. Brazilians know that it is home to an outrageous level of social inequality that its government has not solved, and its own billionaires skip out on taxes, which make Lula’s finger pointing at the rest of the world seem needlessly hypocritical. The Brazilian people have a deep commitment to a fair and just world without a blanket of hypocrisy hanging over those values. Lula looks and sounds nothing like the Brazil that could emerge if its political leadership better reflected the best of its own people.
Both leaders seem to be relics of a time that has passed, but neither seems aware of it. But both Brazil and Colombia will have presidential elections in two years, and new leaders may emerge that more closely represent where these countries are heading next.