Former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s recent narrow victory over incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in the country’s presidential elections is a measure of how sharply divided Brazilian society is today. 

Lula won by a mere one per cent, or just over two million votes, in a population of 214 million. His most immediate task will now be to mend the rifts in Brazilian society, a huge challenge given its acute polarisation. Will he also try to claim achievements in foreign policy as a means to gain support in the opposition political camp? 

He is well equipped to do so, in view of his regional and global vision and his personal prestige in regional and international politics, not to mention Brazil’s status as the largest and most influential country in Latin America. 

But the success of any foreign policy drive he undertakes will be contingent on working closely with other Third World countries, especially Brazil’s counterparts in other regions. The reference here is to Egypt and India, which have a status in the Middle East and Asia that is equivalent to that of Brazil in Latin America and which have also recently acquired a growing international profile.

Coordination between the three countries could alter the global political map. Since the decline of the Nonaligned Movement (NAM) that gave the Third World nations unprecedented influence in the international order at the height of this movement in the 1950s and 1960s, the developing nations have been searching for leadership that could steer them towards independence from the adversarial poles of the current global order.

Such leadership could be found in an Indian-Egyptian-Brazilian triad that would be similar to the Egyptian-Indian-Yugoslavian one that founded the NAM in the 1950s. Recent statements from New Delhi suggest that it is keen to work towards this end. It has made its desire to forge an independent course increasingly clear since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, with regard to which it has refrained from siding with the positions of either the US or Russia. 

Egypt shares this approach, as I believe Brazil will do too under Lula’s leadership. He is likely to move the country closer to China while remaining equidistant from Washington and Moscow. Will he also now join Egypt and India at the helm of an independent Third World? Or will he be too preoccupied by the domestic divisions in Brazil?

*A version of this article appears in print in the 10 November, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.