Europe, disappointed by Lula da Silva for his position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Europe applauded Lula’s return. The years of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency had left European relations with the largest country in Latin America on the ground. No European leader has traveled to Brazil. Bolsonaro was a political pest. Nobody wanted to appear in the picture with a president whom everyone in Europe looked at as a radical and bizarre character.

Bolsonaro’s climate policies, his compliments to Donald Trump and his insults to the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron meant that the relationship was practically frozen.

Lula would come back and the windows would open and the air would flow and a rarefied atmosphere would blow in and the first one would arrive and the flowers would grow and the lovers would meet again and join hands to walk along the avenues. But the story ends here because with the months the Europeans they took disappointments who predict that if the relationship is better than with Bolsonaro, it won’t be as good as it was during Lula’s first term.

The Brazilian president’s trip to China and his anti-European statements about Russia’s war in Ukraine were the last straw. In Brussels and in the European chancelleries the Brazilian president’s certain words are increasingly annoyingwho argues that what Europe and the US should do is stop arming Ukraine.

The doubts

They repeat that if they do this, the result will be that Russia will conquer its neighbor and Ukraine will disappear from the map. Lula condemns the Russian attack but his solution, Europeans estimate, would allow such an attack to achieve its objectives.

The disappointment runs deep. This is written in a text prepared by European diplomacy for a meeting of foreign ministers next week The European Union is “concerned about Brazil’s position in the war with Russia against Ukraine and for Brazil’s failure to comply with climate and environmental policies.

Lula’s position on the war in Ukraine annoys Brussels because the Europeans they expected at least a position of neutrality and they believe that Lula’s Brazil is slipping into a position of support for China and incidentally for Russia.

Even the institutions of the European Union officially hoped that Lula’s return would allow it move forward to unblock the agreement between Mercosur and the European Unionclosed since June 2019 but not signed or ratified.

But although the ultimate reasons for this blockade go beyond Bolsonaro and have to do with European fear of competition from the Mercosur agricultural sector and that of the Mercosur countries to open their markets to European industrial products, with Lula everything had to go better than with Bolsonaro, they believed in Brussels.

The text states that “the progress of the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur will be of fundamental importance”. Germany has an idea to make the European offer more attractive than the Chinese one. He would like to say that Europe does not import raw materials and rare earths from Latin American countries in general and from Mercosur in particular, but already processed products.

Competence

Europe would invest in collaboration with the Mercosur countries to produce minerals that have already been processed and not do like China, which takes the minerals, processes them and resells them.

This would generate more value and more activity at the source. But Europeans know that competition from China is very tough because, among other things, the Chinese don’t go around the world asking for, for example, certain environmental policies or the non-use of certain pesticides.

European diplomacy goes further and begins to wonder, sources from the bloc say, if Brazil, due to its commercial dependence on China, which is already its first partner, it is ceasing to be one of the great neutral countries of the global south as was understood up to now to get closer to the axis that the Chinese and the Russians would form.

Worse with Lula than with Bolsonaro? A Scandinavian diplomat says that the opinion among his colleagues is not that but that the disappointment is profound. Lula will go to Madrid next week, where he will meet President Pedro Sánchez.

Spain, which is also a member of NATO and which supplies arms to Ukraine, will assume the six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union on 1 July and among its priorities for the semester is the promotion of trade pacts with the Latin America. And the war, like all European countries.