Itamaraty, Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is believed to be one of the most professional diplomatic bodies within Latin America, especially significant considering its relative autonomy from the executive. Nevertheless, the next Brazilian presidential elections could have a dramatic effect on its diplomacy and foreign policy. In recent years, Brazil has embraced multipolarity, but a conservative president could easily transform the international projection of this South American giant.
Itamaraty under strain: the Jair Bolsonaro precedent
Brazil’s upcoming presidential elections come at a time of significant domestic polarisation and international pressure on this South American giant. The two leading candidates, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Flávio Bolsonaro (son of former president Jair Bolsonaro), are not only proposing contrasting visions of Brazil’s internal affairs. Their fundamentally different approaches to international affairs could also shape the country’s future diplomacy and the role of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, known as Itamaraty – perhaps the only diplomatic body worldwide to have played a primary role in the formation of the state. During his presidency, Jair Bolsonaro openly attempted to turn Itamaraty into the ideological backbone of Brazilian conservatism. With Ernesto Araújo as Foreign Minister, Brazilian foreign policy broke with several cardinal principles enshrined in the Constitution and in diplomatic practice since the transition to democracy began in 1985.
Jair Bolsonaro’s foreign policy under his presidency (2019–2023) undermined core national principles, including international law, human rights and environmental protection. Brazil’s commitment to Latin American integration, as indicated in Article 4 of the Brazilian Constitution, was set aside in favour of full alignment with the first Trump administration. South–South cooperation, central to President Lula’s foreign policy, suffered two major changes.
Firstly, Bolsonaro ideologised bilateral relations with Global South partners, such as Angola, to the point of using his presidential powers to fund Evangelical churches in the Lusophone African nation. Secondly, the prioritisation of cooperation shifted toward strengthening ties with conservative governments, including the US, Israel and Hungary. Bolsonaro went further in proposing to move the Brazilian Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Although Itamaraty could, at the time, resist some of Bolsonaro’s foreign policy turmoils (such as allowing a US military base in Brazil), structural conditions also helped prevent the bureaucracy from being completely submitted to the executive's hard-line conservatism.
Three relevant elements stand out: China, COVID-19 and the US. Since 2018, China has been Brazil’s main trading partner, steadily surpassing the US and the EU, with recorded bilateral trade of USD 158 billion as of 2024. Brazilian agribusiness, a robust electoral base for Bolsonaro, largely depends on soy bean exports to Beijing. Despite this, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro went so far as to claim that the virus was a Chinese-made biological weapon. This led to the agribusiness sector pressuring the Bolsonaro administration to preserve commercial ties with China, which continued to grow without interruption, even under his presidency. The last element, the US, is also determinant. Bolsonaro’s popularity was undermined not only by his mismanagement of COVID-19, but also by Joe Biden's arrival in the White House. Without Trump, Bolsonaro’s ideologised foreign policy lost ground, and the Democrat-led administration even helped to prevent the coup d’état attempt of 8 January 2023.
Multipolarity and Brazil's new environment
Even if the tradition of Brazilian foreign policy survived the Bolsonaro wave, preserving some achievements of Lula’s external action, Itamaraty is not guaranteed to survive a second time. US–China clashes in Latin America are at their height. The second Trump administration openly endorses Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, in his presidential candidacy, and conservative Brazilians remain sceptical about the existence of COVID-19. In this new global context, less liberal and more multipolar than the 2010s, the upcoming Brazilian presidential elections could bring a completely different scenario to Brazil’s foreign policy, even more starkly than what has been experienced during the term of Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula’s return to the Brazilian presidency in 2023 relaunched Itamaraty’s role, and that of Brazil as a global player. Between 2024 and 2025, Brazil experienced real diplomatic momentum, hosting the BRICS, G20 and COP30 summits. Combined with the revival of negotiations (and later conclusion) of the EU–Mercosur trade agreement and deeper ties with non-Western partners, especially ASEAN countries, Brazilian foreign policy under Lula pursued a broad and flexible approach to navigating an increasingly multipolar world, maintaining engagement across a wide range of partnerships. It navigated the multipolar world without forgetting or ignoring any partnership. Proof of this is the recently launched Partners for Multilateralism initiative (P4M), through which Brazil, Canada, Kenya and the EU joined forces to support the UN amid the attacks of the Trump administration. The threats from the US under Trump and Rubio, and from Argentina under President Milei, were addressed through diversification with regard to the former and diplomatic measures the latter. As Washington became an unreliable partner, Lula’s foreign policy pushed thematic agendas with alternative international actors, not only to build distance from the US, but possibly also to build material capabilities to avoid becoming vulnerable to ongoing attacks from the White House. In a multipolar context, Lula’s multipolar autonomy became a tool to expand Brazil’s international exposure and take advantage of the new space created by the fragmentation of global power.
Lula’s multipolar autonomy
Celso Amorim, former Brazilian Foreign Minister, Minister of Defence and long-time advisor of President Lula, recently summarised Brazil’s current global strategy. Discussing the outcomes of the last BRICS summit in India, Amorim assured his audience that Brazil’s ties with BRICS countries do not come at the cost of downgrading relations with the EU, Latin America or even the US. Focusing only on trade data from Brazil’s Ministry of Commerce (COMEXSTAT) repository, Brazil’s exports to both the EU and the US have grown during the last Lula administration. Nonetheless, the trade realm does not entail diplomatic convergences. As a founding member of BRICS, Brazil does not follow the EU position on the Russian war against Ukraine. Brazil depends on Russian fertilisers and, constitutionally, cannot apply sanctions outside of the UN Security Council’s provision. Still, in areas such as climate and digital cooperation, the convergence with the EU appears to be significant. Itamaraty’s division for technology and innovation (SECTEC) acknowledged, in a personal communication with the author, the relevance of the EU on digital policies. On climate, Lula’s efforts to bring COP30 to Brazil and attempt to balance new oil discoveries with climate protection policies signal a substantial difference with the Trump administration’s stances, while bringing it closer to European perspectives.
At the same time, Lula’s foreign policy has clearly strengthened ties with additional partners, for instance, in the defence realm. Lula’s electoral programme states that foreign policy priorities include increasing defence spending and widening exchanges with Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Furthermore, the ongoing Brazilian defence policy appears to be inclined toward endogenous production, which has already led to the production of a Gripen fighter jet made in Brazil, and diversification away from the US as the main military provider. In this sense, India, Russia and Türkiye appear to be the international actors that, from a military standpoint, Lula’s foreign policy has prioritized, and this is likely to continue in a subsequent presidential term.
The Brazilian aerospace corporation Embraer has already inaugurated an office in India, with the clear aim of fulfilling India’s military air defence needs. Nikolay Patrushev, Putin’s advisor, met with Celso Amorim to discuss maritime security projects. Lula and Erdogan recently spoke by phone to expand the existing defence partnership between Brazil and Türkiye, pushing for initiatives like the memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Turkish Aerospace Industries and Embraer for joint production and development in the military sector. Lula’s recent and future foreign policy moves are linked to the search for alternative military partners to avoid the US. In this context, Brazil’s multipolar autonomy should not be seen as a peril, but a logical process for any Global South country that wants a say in a multipolar world. By contrast, Flávio Bolsonaro’s eventual arrival at Planalto, the presidential palace, could severely undermine Brazil–EU relations.
The Flávio Bolsonaro scenario: a second rupture for Itamaraty?
A Flávio Bolsonaro presidency would not simply resume where his father left off. It would inherit a considerably more multipolar global environment in which to operate. Trump’s second administration has already signalled open support for Flávio's candidacy, a degree of interference that, if translated into a governing relationship, would likely reproduce the alignment pattern Ernesto Araújo pursued: full deference to Washington's positions on China, multilateral institutions and climate governance, at the expense of the diversification Lula has spent this term building. BRICS participation, EU–Mercosur ratification and the defence partnerships with India, Russia and Türkiye described above would all become vulnerable – not necessarily to formal withdrawal, but to the kind of ideological downgrading that characterised Bolsonaro's treatment of South–South cooperation, in which partnerships were reoriented around shared conservative politics rather than material national interest.
Yet the structural conditions that constrained the elder Bolsonaro have not disappeared; some have even deepened. China’s position as Brazil's primary trading partner is more entrenched in 2026 than it was in 2018, and Brazilian agribusiness, still Flávio’s core electoral constituency, remains no less dependent on the Chinese market than it was under his father. This suggests that even under a restorationist foreign policy, Itamaraty's institutional capacity to resist full ideological capture would again depend less on the diplomatic corps’ own resilience than on these external material constraints. For the EU, this points to an uncomfortable asymmetry: Brussels may find that safeguarding EU–Mercosur and its broader Brazilian partnership depends less on Brazilian electoral outcomes than on whether Washington's confrontation with Beijing intensifies to the point of overriding Brazilian commercial self-interest altogether.
Conclusion: what Europe should watch for in Brazil
Brazil’s electoral outcomes matter less as switches than as accelerators or brakes on structural forces already in motion. Bolsonaro could ideologise rhetoric and downgrade partnerships, but he will not be able to modify Brazil’s dependency on Chinese demand, nor will he be able to single-handedly overturn Itamaraty’s institutional memory. Lula has capitalised on conditions – China's entrenchment, Washington's declining reliability and a genuinely multipolar order – in a way that a different president would also have had to navigate, if not necessarily embrace. For Europe, this suggests two things.
First, EU–Mercosur and Brazil’s broader Global South engagement should not be read as contingent on Lula personally; they rest on material foundations – agribusiness’ China dependency, defence diversification (already underway) and so on – that would outlast any single administration, even a hostile one. Second, and more troublingly, how much those foundations protect the relationship depends heavily on variables Brussels does not control: the intensity of US–China rivalry and whether Washington’s confrontation with Beijing escalates to the point of forcing Brazil into binary alignment. Brazil’s multipolar autonomy is not a permanent condition but a strategy exploiting a particular systemic moment. Europe’s task is not merely to court Brasilia, but to understand that Brazil’s room for manoeuvre, and by extension the durability of any EU partnership, is itself a function of a global order still very much in flux.
The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union / Global Dialogue.
