When Goldman Sachs’ Jim O’Neill coined the BRICS acronym in 2001, Brazil stood at the front of it. A quarter of a century later, it may be the first founding member to walk away from the burgeoning trading bloc.
Flávio Bolsonaro’s narrow first-round win on October 4, with 47.03% of valid votes against 45.16% for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is hardening into a lead. The first post-ballot survey by PoderData/Aya puts the senator on 53% and the seasoned leftist leader on 47% ahead of the October 25 runoff, a three-point swing each way since its last pre-vote poll. Lula, 80 and seeking a fourth term, is fighting a rival 35 years his junior who carries his imprisoned father’s name and his father’s grievances.
Most commentary on the race has focused on crime, the dire fiscal outlook and the fate of Brazil’s Supreme Court, embroiled in a sprawling scandal linked to a failed bank. The bigger consequences, however, may lie abroad. Flávio Bolsonaro said in June that on his first day in office he would reassess whether Brazil should remain in a bloc he called “highly ideological”, accusing it of baiting Washington over the dollar, and that leaving was on the table. His foreign policy programme runs to two pages. It does not mention BRICS, prioritising OECD accession and closer ties with the US, Israel and Argentina.
History suggests he may not follow through. After all, his father kept Brazil in the group, trade with China hit records on his watch and Brasília resisted US pressure to exclude Huawei from its 5G rollout. Analysts argue that export interests and institutional inertia would constrain the son just as they constrained the father. “China’s weight in Brazil’s trade and investment relationships would impose substantial limits on any effort to privilege Washington at Beijing’s expense,” Brookings scholars Diana Paz García and Bruce Jones wrote in a short essay.
That reading underestimates how much has changed. In 2019, BRICS was a low-cost talking shop of five. Today it includes Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE and Indonesia, and its agenda leans openly towards dedollarisation. Washington no longer tolerates hedging either. President Donald Trump has threatened extra tariffs on any country aligning with what he calls the bloc’s anti-American policies, and he slapped heavy duties on Brazilian goods in 2025 partly in retaliation for the prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro, a close ideological ally. A Bolsonaro 2.0 government indebted to Washington for an overt campaign of interference on its behalf would find a BRICS exit a cheap way to settle the debt.
And cheap is the operative word, because BRICS is not China. Brazil exported $99.9bn of goods to China last year, nearly three times the $37.7bn it sold to the US, and almost 80% of its soybean exports went to Chinese buyers. None of that trade runs through BRICS. Beijing buys soybeans and iron ore because it needs them, not because Brazilian diplomats attend summits. A president can leave the club and keep the customer. The only real tie is Brazil’s nearly 20% stake in the New Development Bank, and that is a balance-sheet question rather than a strategic one.
For Washington, meanwhile, the prize is considerable. The so-called Donroe Doctrine, Trump’s revival of the Monroe Doctrine, has moved from slogan to practice this year. US forces seized Nicolás Maduro in January and left his deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, running Venezuela under US tutelage. In March, Trump gathered a dozen friendly governments at his Doral resort to launch the Shield of the Americas, a flagship counter-cartel security coalition. Brazil, Mexico and Colombia were not invited. Flávio Bolsonaro, by contrast, used a White House meeting in May to ask Trump to designate two Brazilian criminal groups as foreign terrorist organisations, and Washington promptly obliged.
Brazil, Latin America's largest economy, would be the biggest catch in the region’s run of right-wing victories, from Chile last December to Colombia and Peru this year, all of them cheered on openly by the Trump administration. Once it falls, Mexico will be the only large nation in the region still governed by the left, and Claudia Sheinbaum has proved far more pliable to US demands than Lula. Argentina, which set the pace for the region’s swing to the right, was the proof of concept. Javier Milei turned down the country’s BRICS invitation on taking office in 2023 to pursue closer US ties, yet kept its trade and financial links with Beijing intact. Brazil would be the consolidation.
It would also be the richer haul: Brazil offers almost everything the US wants to stop buying from China. It holds nearly a quarter of global rare earth reserves yet produced less than 1% of world output last year. The test case came in September, when USA Rare Earth completed its roughly $2.8bn takeover of Serra Verde, Brazil’s only commercial rare earth producer. The deal was backed by a $565mn loan from the US International Development Finance Corporation and $750mn from the Department of War. Lula criticised the deal but did not block it. He did sign a critical minerals law that creates an interministerial council with power to approve and prioritise projects. Talks on a federal minerals accord with Washington have stalled over a clause Brazilian officials read as granting the US preferential access.
Under Lula, that council is a gatekeeper. Under a Bolsonaro, it becomes a turnstile. Flávio raised rare earths with Trump in May and has backed closer cooperation on processing. Add oil exports heading for a record this year, and Brazil starts to look like the resource anchor of an American hemisphere rather than the swing state of a multipolar one.
That is the blow to Beijing and Moscow. BRICS’ claim to speak for the Global South rests on geography as much as on economics. It needs a democratic, non-aligned Latin American heavyweight to rebut the charge that it is a front for Russian and, most importantly, Chinese ambitions. Lula supplied exactly that. He pushed local-currency settlement with China, planned a yuan-denominated sovereign bond and installed former president Dilma Rousseff at the helm of the New Development Bank in Shanghai. He also co-founded the Partners for Multilateralism initiative with Canada, the EU and India last month, a project Brookings' García and Jones expect a Bolsonaro victory would interrupt.
The bloc’s champions insist the loss would not matter. Pepe Escobar, a Brazilian commentator and longtime advocate of the Sino-Russian project, told Brazil’s TV 247 that Moscow and Beijing are building a multipolar architecture “with or without Brazil”. He warned that the country risks reverting to “a mere backyard of the empire”. The first claim undercuts itself. A multipolar order built without Brazil, and with Argentina already gone, has no foothold in the Americas. It shrinks to a coalition of Eurasian and Gulf powers plus South Africa and an India that hedges as carefully as Brazil once did. That is a concession of the hemisphere, which is exactly what the Donroe Doctrine demands.
Even a formal exit may prove unnecessary, and the bloc’s defenders know it. Escobar’s real fear is not a clean break. He expects the White House to push a Bolsonaro government to “start destroying BRICS from within”, leaving Brazil a “pro forma” member. Flávio Bolsonaro has already shown his hand, reportedly assuring the US Trade Representative in July that he would keep Brazil’s homegrown Pix instant payments system, which Washington has targeted in a trade investigation, out of non-Western cross-border settlement schemes.
A Brazil that stays nominally inside BRICS while vetoing its financial plumbing would do the project more damage than one that slams the door. The next pressure point is likely to be Chinese industrial investment rather than soybeans. Escobar predicts Washington will press Brasília to erect barriers to Chinese electric vehicle and technology groups, whose weight in Brazil is growing fast. BYD’s plant in Bahia, opened last year, would be the first target.
Latin American politics moves in waves, and the region is currently following a rightward tide that has swept much of the democratic world. The left may return in time and reverse summit communiqués overnight, but rare earth concessions, US-financed processing plants and ironclad security pacts would prove far harder to unpick. If the polls hold, the multipolar order will lose more than a letter on October 25. It will lose the hemisphere.