Post-Brexit Britain has a new best friend: Brazil

LONDON — With the second age of Donald Trump looming, and European allies such as France and Germany hobbled by political instability, the United Kingdom has been on the hunt for new friends on the world stage.

And now it seems Prime Minister Keir Starmer has found a somewhat unlikely new BFF: Brazil.

It is a relationship founded on a shared commitment to climate goals — with the wheels of diplomacy oiled by some hearty football banter.

Since Starmer became prime minister in July, no fewer than 12 British ministers have made the 5,500-mile trip from London to Brazil.

That’s partly because the South American nation hosted this year’s G20 summit of world leaders. But it also reflects a growing closeness between the two governments on the pressing need to tackle the global climate crisis.

Just since November, London and Brasília have joined forces to launch a multistate clean energy pact, coordinated announcements of major new climate targets, and talked up cooperation ahead of the next big United Nation climate summit, to be held in the Brazilian port city of Belém in 2025.

Amid global uncertainty, these are the sorts of “coalitions of the willing” on climate diplomacy that green-conscious leaders will need to forge, said Robin Niblett, a distinguished fellow and former chief executive at the Chatham House think tank.

But the new best buddies will also have to navigate disagreements over one of the biggest foreign policy issues of all — Russia and Ukraine.

Football … and diplomacy

In a bid to lock in the alliance, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — expected back at work after Christmas following a health scare — has invited Starmer for yet another visit next year. It will be a chance to “map the opportunities and economic areas where the countries can work together,” Brazil said.

If Starmer and Lula can make it work, they will owe a debt of thanks to a shared love of football — and especially Starmer’s beloved Arsenal, where four Brazilians ply their trade. 

A football-centric bromance was on show at the G20, according to one Lula ally.

“It helps significantly that they are both football enthusiasts,” Brazil’s ambassador in London, Antonio Patriota, told POLITICO. “The initial minutes of the bilateral were dedicated to football.”

Beneath the Arsenal chat, though, is a flurry of diplomatic activity more than a year in the making to build up the relationship. 

Foreign Secretary David Lammy, who has said climate will be “central” to British foreign policy under Labour, visited Brazil last summer, before the general election. 

Starmer, then the opposition leader, first met Lula at COP28 in 2023 and began the conversation, one U.K. official said, which last month resulted in the Clean Power Alliance energy deal, an 11-country bloc (plus the African Union) that has promised to work together on trebling renewable energy by 2030.

Patriota praised the diplomatic signals sent out by a Lammy speech in September, with its “very explicit recognition of the asymmetries that penalize developing countries, and especially countries that are highly vulnerable to climate.” 

And with the United States unlikely to be a reliable partner under Trump — whose pick for energy secretary, businessperson Chris Wright, has accused the U.K. of “impoverishing people” through its green policies — post-Brexit Britain needs new friends (at least if it wants to get anything done).

“There are not many successful social democrats in the world at the moment,” said Richard Lapper, a foreign policy consultant. “Arguably Starmer and Lula are two of them. They are swimming against the tide in a way.”

In Brazil, Starmer sees an ally that can bridge divides between developed countries — the U.K.’s usual allies in the G7 or NATO — and developing countries in the G20 and beyond being courted by an emboldened China and Russia.

The buddy-up “exemplifies collaboration between the Global North and South,” said a second U.K. government official, granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The personal connections go deeper still. When Energy Secretary Ed Miliband visited Brazil earlier this year — his first international trip in post — he met Lula’s top diplomatic adviser Celso Amorim, “someone he’s known for many years,” Patriota said. Amorim is a leading figure on the Brazilian left and a former student of Miliband’s Marxist academic father, Ralph Miliband.

The shadow of Putin

But the blossoming friendship carries risk for Starmer. 

The two governments are far apart over a key foreign policy question — Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine.

The U.K. has maintained its place as a key military supplier to Ukraine under Starmer. The prime minister’s position has started to bend slightly, as the reality of Trump’s victory forces a rethink, but Lula has long called for a negotiated settlement (while condemning Russia’s invasion). Last year he accused the U.S. of “encouraging” the conflict, and was rebuked by the Americans in turn for “parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda.” 

Brazil is also close to China, its biggest trading partner, and relies on Russia for fertilizer to supply its vast agricultural sector. 

Patriota said that such differences need not stand in the way of climate collaboration with the U.K.

But he added: “It strikes Brazil — and this is a point that President Lula often makes, he made it at the G20 — that we find it so difficult to raise a level of financial support to combat climate change … [but] nations around the world applaud when military budgets go up.”

The stark difference in tone between Brasília and London on military matters comes at a time when the U.K. plans to increase defense spending to 2.5 percent in the face of Russian aggression in Eastern Europe.

In a “multipolar, complex and unpredictable world,” the U.K. could nonetheless use new friends, said Chatham House’s Niblett. “We’re about to enter really choppy waters. We’re going to have to be a coalition-builder — because America is not going to be.”

Next stop, Belém

It is already possible to make out the contours of the U.K.-Brazil relationship next year. 

Brazil hosts the U.N.’s global climate summit COP30 in 2025, at the same time the two countries celebrate 200 years of formal diplomatic relations.

For much of that period, the two — now the world’s sixth and tenth biggest economies — haven’t felt the need to create much of an alliance. COP30 is another chance to change that.

Brazil has a target of ending illegal deforestation by 2030, with stewardship of the world’s greatest rainforest a pillar of its international climate responsibilities. The U.K.’s Labour government has positioned itself as a global leader on climate and has its own 2030 ambition: cutting fossil fuels almost entirely from its electricity supply.

Patriota, Lula’s man in London, stuck to diplomatic language and did not name Trump when discussing the relationship. Instead, he stressed that Brazil and Britain wanted to set “examples of active and responsible behavior” on climate, “independently of what other players may decide to do or not.”

Niblett said: “If the U.K. is seen as the more predictable player on the green agenda, then we may get more of the foreign investment into our efforts to drive green transition.” That would help Starmer with his clean energy mission at home, he added — “because we’ve got very little domestic dosh to put into that process.”

Trade and investment would be on the agenda for any visit next year, Patriota added. “Trade between Brazil and the U.K. could be [at] much higher levels than it is today,” he said.

But some experts played down the trade relationship. The U.K., relatively speaking, is a “bit player” in economic importance to Brazil, said Lapper. Brazil is the U.K.’s 28th largest trading partner, accounting for 0.6 percent of total U.K. trade, according to the latest Whitehall data.

And Starmer will need to tread carefully. Free-trade negotiations between the European Union and Mercosur, the South American trade bloc of which Brazil is part, took 25 years and still face opposition from farmers in France and elsewhere, over fears they will be undercut by cheap imports. The agreement “risks having dramatic consequences for agriculture,” said Arnaud Rousseau, head of the country’s powerful French FNSEA association. Starmer, already facing the fury of U.K. farmers, can ill afford to anger rural voters even more.

But with such an unpromising geopolitical backdrop, both countries seem determined not to let potential pitfalls stand in the way of action on a shared priority — climate.

Both can play “a significant role in today’s world affairs,” Patriota said. “In the case of Brazil, you could describe it as an emerging role. It is the first time in our history.

“In the case of Britain — perhaps a moment where Britain is trying to redefine its position in international affairs.”