Brazilian foreign policy for Africa from Lula to Temer

mudança matricial em meio à crise

Abstract

Brazilian foreign policy towards Africa has suffered a major inflection from the 2000s. The rise to power of Luiz Inácio (Lula) da Silva underscored a clear change in Brazilian Foreign Policy paradigms, leading to a resumption of the assignment of importance to the African continent. Since Dilma Rousseff’s first term, started in 2011, relations with the continent have lost weakened as a result of internal and external constraints, although they have maintained their relevance to the country — both politically and economically. With Michel Temer’s rise to power in 2016, there was a reorientation in Brazilian foreign policy general lines, calling into question the space occupied by the African continent throughout the 2000s. This paper, thus, seeks to analyze the impact imposed by the Temer administration to the Brazilian foreign policy to Africa. To this end, it relies mainly on the works of Charles Herman (1990), with the aim of analyzing the different levels of foreign policy change, and of Ricardo Sennes (2003), in order to demonstrate that the foreign policy matrix that marked the Lula and Rousseff governments is distinct from that of Temer government.