As Brazil takes over the G20 presidency from India on December 1, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will face the challenge of making good on his promise to uphold the interests of the global South amid two ongoing wars and a slowing global economy.

Lula also takes over at one point bitter internal divisions Within the group, the legacy of outgoing President Narendra Modi, whose team, eager to force a joint statement, trampled on diplomatic niceties in closed-door meetings.

Despite these hurdles, Lula is moving forward and as G20 leader has announced Brazil’s top three priorities: social inclusion and the fight against hunger, phasing out fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy and reforming global economic governance.

The Group of Twenty – the G20 – is a forum for the world’s largest economies to coordinate on key global policy issues. Taken together, the G20 countries represent 85 percent of global production and two-thirds of the world’s population.

The G20 consists of the European Union and 19 other countries, a mix of industrialized and emerging economies. At its G20 leadership summit in September, India invited the African Union – which represents 55 countries across the continent – to become a member of the group.

This was seen as a move to underline Modi’s self-proclaimed role as the “mother of democracy… to mitigate the global trust deficit” between rich and poor nations.

The G20 was founded in 1999 after the Asian financial crisis. Originally conceived as a council for finance ministers to discuss macroeconomic policies, its scope has since expanded to cover issues ranging from global development to climate change and gender equality.

Critics, on the other hand, have dismissed the G20 as an ineffective discussion group. The group came together in over 200 meetings around their annual meeting Explanation. Otherwise, New Delhi only made one joint statement – ​​on the African Union.

Against a backdrop of increasing geopolitical tensions, South Africa and Brazil have done so openly criticized Israel’s bombing of the Gaza Strip. China, for its part hosted a delegation Muslim countries called for a ceasefire in November. The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has also undermined consensus-building efforts elsewhere.

Although India maintains a neutral stance in this conflict, it has become more critical Russia in recent months. Modi has also scaled back military purchases from Moscow and strengthened diplomatic ties with the West.

Vladimir Putin, who is under an international arrest warrant on war crimes charges declined to attend the September gathering in New Delhi. Chinese President Xi Jinping also skipped the event as geopolitical tensions with India increased and relations with Russia deepened.

That didn’t stop India from “turning the annual summit into a commercial for Modi’s cult of personality,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “In practice, it was an ineffective presidency” as the host was more interested in boosting his domestic image than addressing global challenges.

“As Modi seeks to portray India as a global superpower, he is passing the baton with no shortage of problems… the global economy is slowing, climate change is looming and conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine have undermined North-South relations “, added her.

Ahead of the handover this week, Lula told a virtual summit of G20 leaders: “I hope so [Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire] An agreement can pave the way for a lasting political solution to the conflict.”

Brazil has long supported a two-state solution. Since The Hamas attacks on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli bombing of the Gaza StripLula has repeatedly called for a quick and definitive end to the fighting.

In October, Brazil chaired a UN Security Council resolution in which a pause in the conflict was called for, but the USA vetoed it.

“Lula’s position on Israel is delicate, but he is arguably the world’s best-positioned statesman to try to stop the carnage,” Ghosh added.

Elsewhere, Brazil’s president has angered Western leaders by suggesting that Russia and Ukraine should share shared responsibility for their conflict. He has publicly supported both Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin to attend the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro next year.

Equitable global growth

At the G20 summit in New Delhi in September, President Lula called on world leaders to end world hunger by 2030.

“Part of this could be achieved through the creation of a global task force against hunger,” a Brazilian government official, who did not want to be named, told Al Jazeera.

“The task force would seek to rally support in areas such as low-carbon agricultural research and agricultural insurance improvements, particularly in food insecure countries… which would require more funding from wealthy nations,” the source said. It’s not clear how likely these are to get through.

Lula has also supported the idea of ​​a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15 percent. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) plan, designed in 2021 to curb tax evasion and curb decades of tax competition between governments, could raise at least $150 billion a year additional global tax revenues yearly.

Nearly 140 governments have signed the OECD agreement and are at various stages of translating the proposal into law.

“By expanding the OECD program, Brazil also wants to increase investment in the green transition. “Lula wants the G20 to allocate more funding to renewable energy and conservation projects,” the official noted.

Reform of multilateral institutions

Lula has been campaigning for years to strengthen the role of multilateral bodies such as the United Nations in solving global challenges. However, his commitment to diplomacy goes beyond a penchant for consensus.

At the UN General Assembly in New York in September, Lula defended the need to redesign the global governance system. “The unequal and distorted representation at the top of the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the World Bank is unacceptable,” he said.

In 2022, the IMF provided $160 billion SDRthe fund’s reserve currency, to European countries and just $34 billion to all of Africa.

“The unfair allocation of SDRs is only part of the problem,” says Rogerio Studart, a former Brazilian representative at the World Bank.

“In addition, the fund quota limits for emergency lending are too low,” said Studart. He alluded to IMF programs such as the Resilience and Sustainability Trust, in which countries’ grants are limited to 150 percent of their capital commitments to the fund.

“These limit the amount of money available for climate disasters, particularly in low-income countries. “I think Lula will try to increase country quotas for emergency loans and reduce the conditions attached to these programs,” he added, pointing out that success is unclear as this has been tried for years.

Studart also rejected the World Bank’s “cautious” approach to risk tolerance.

“The bank can raise significantly more money for developing countries by adjusting its loan-to-equity ratio,” he said. A higher ratio would increase the bank’s lending capacity but would come with a higher risk of non-repayment.

His comments echo a G20 report released in July that said groups like the World Bank could unlock billions of dollars in additional loans by slightly increasing their lending rate. “Brazil will confirm the findings of the report,” Studart said.

For Ghosh, the economics professor: “Lula is pragmatic through and through. While the previous G20 presidency was more about domestic politics, Lula is the ideal candidate to try to restore some degree of stability to today’s fragmented world order.”