Brazil once aspired to be South America’s natural leader. Today, despite renewed global visibility under President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the country’s regional presence has quietly diminished. In Latin America, Brazil is no longer a protagonist. Instead, it is retreating into the background, leaving a vacuum that others are increasingly eager to fill.
A pivotal opportunity to reverse this trend is approaching. In 2025, Brazil will host the United Nations COP30 Climate Change Conference in Belem, which Lula hopes to use as a platform to reassert Brazil’s leadership not only globally, but also regionally. With the start of a new electoral cycle in 2026 signaling political uncertainty ahead at home, COP30 may be Lula’s last major chance to reconnect Brazil with its neighbors in a meaningful way. It will be crucial for Brazil to ensure the high-profile summit yields more concrete commitments than the underwhelming final declaration from Brazil’s recent rotating presidency of the G20, which ended in November 2024, and recent summits of the Mercosur trade bloc of Southern Cone nations.
Lula’s return to power in January 2023 was met with high expectations, both inside and outside Brazil. After four years of erratic and isolationist foreign policy under former President Jair Bolsonaro, Lula promised a return to multilateralism, regional integration and South-South cooperation. His first year in office saw ambitious gestures: renewed participation in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, or CELAC, founded in 2010 to promote regional dialogue; proposals to revitalize the Union of South American Nations, or Unasur, launched in 2008 during Lula’s first stint as president to advance political and economic coordination; and symbolic visits to Argentina and Uruguay. Brazil also assumed the G20 rotating presidency in late 2023 and launched preparations for COP30, positioning itself once again as a central voice in climate diplomacy.