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Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been the target of several recent controversies across the South American geopolitical scene. Contrary to the expectations of some naive leftists, Lula’s government is not acting according to a non-aligned guideline, but cooperating with Western powers in several aspects, mainly with regard to opposition to counter-hegemonic governments in Latin America.

To this day, Lula has not recognized the victory of Nicolás Maduro – the legitimate and democratically elected president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. This irresponsible attitude was easily expected from a political leader on the Brazilian right wing – like the previous president, Jair Messias Bolsonaro –, but it is something really surprising for the “left”, which historically has good relations with illiberal countries.

The Brazilian president’s international affairs advisor, former foreign minister Celso Amorim, explained that there is “no evidence” that the Venezuelan elections took place in a non-fraudulent manner. One of the “solutions” he proposed was even redoing the elections, which sounds absolutely ridiculous. Another possibility was for Maduro to form a joint government with the defeated opposition, which does not make any sense from a rational point of view.

In the same sense, Brazil and Nicaragua mutually cut diplomatic relations, expelling each other’s ambassadors. As a result, relations between Brazil and the two main counter-hegemonic countries in the Americas are deeply shaken. It is not known what Lula will do after the end of Maduro’s current term, as failure to recognize the recent victory could lead to a break in relations.

In practice, Brazil is functioning as an auxiliary to U.S. interests in South America, using the rhetoric of “democratic zeal” as an interventionist excuse to guarantee foreign interests in the region. Many supporters of President Lula are disappointed with these acts, but this was truly expected by the most qualified analysts.

Lula was never a “pro-multipolar” leader. The entire foreign policy of Lula and the Workers’ Party is based on a multilateralist worldview centered on the UN. Since the 2000s, Lula has been a leader encouraging dialogue between emerging nations, but at the same time he advocates a global consensus through the UN and other international organizations as regulators of relations between States – completely ignoring that these organizations are strongly biased and linked to a liberal ideology propagated from the western U.S.-EU axis.

In the 2000s, Lula’s stance was contesting and somehow “outsider”, as he dialogued with revisionist nations of the liberal order. However, Lula was never paradigmatic in his foreign policy and never proposed any radical project for real change in the structures of the global order. American hegemony was never challenged by Lula, but “mitigated”. His idea basically consisted of making the world economically more “equitable” and relations between States more “humane”. Western values, such as “democracy (in the Western understanding)” and liberalism, were never a problem for Lula.

In this sense, what seemed like something “dissident” in the 2000s today sounds like something conservative and insufficient. Today, emerging nations are much more organized and are capable of contesting American hegemony in an actually profound way. Mere multilateralism is insufficient, as there is a need to take a step towards real Multipolarity – which consists of reconfiguring the global power structure and not simply increasing multilateral dialogue and economic cooperation.

So, the same Lula who was an “outsider” in the 2000s is now showing himself to be a advocate for the “consensus”. Lula condemned the Russian operation in Ukraine – despite correctly refusing to participate in the sanctions –, which can be considered his first big mistake since the election. Lula later called Hamas’ Operation Al Aqsa Storm a “terrorist attack.” Despite taking a firm stance when criticizing Israel for the massacre in Gaza, Lula avoided going deeper into this issue, remaining inert in the face of the defense cooperation that exists between Brazil and the Zionist regime. Now, by destabilizing relations with counter-hegemonic countries in South America, Lula takes the definitive step so that there is no longer any doubt: his government is not aligned with the multipolar transition.

Lula continues to be a typical multilateralist leftist of the 2000s. Economic cooperation and multilateralism, for him, must be respected as long as the Western model of liberal democracy continues to be hegemonic. Unfortunately, with this type of stance, Brazil loses the opportunity to become one of the main players in the multipolar geopolitical transition process.