NEW DELHI: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will skip the 18th BRICS Leaders’ Summit in New Delhi on September 12-13, choosing to remain in Brazil as he prepares for the country’s election campaign. Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira will represent Brazil at the summit.
Lula’s absence is noteworthy not only because Brazil is one of the founding members of BRICS, but also because he is now the only sitting leader from the original BRIC quartet that first gathered at the leaders’ level in 2009.
The inaugural BRIC summit, held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, brought together then Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Lula.
The grouping has since been transformed from a compact economic grouping of four emerging powers into an 11-member platform spanning major economies, energy producers and developing countries across continents.
That evolution gives Lula’s absence a wider context. BRICS is meeting in New Delhi at a moment when the global economic and geopolitical order is under pressure from wars, trade tensions, energy insecurity and an increasingly fragmented international system.
The grouping’s origins, however, were far less geopolitical. The BRIC acronym was coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 to describe Brazil, Russia, India and China as emerging engines of global growth. His argument was that the economic weight of these countries would rise significantly and that global institutions would eventually have to accommodate their growing influence.
BRIC became an institutional grouping in 2006, held its first leaders’ summit in 2009 and added South Africa in 2010, becoming BRICS. The New Development Bank, announced in 2014, was an important step towards creating financial institutions outside the traditional Western-led architecture.
The latest expansion has fundamentally changed the bloc’s character. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE joined in 2024, followed by Indonesia in 2025. Ten countries, including Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Vietnam and Kazakhstan, have also joined as partner countries.
New Delhi is seeking to use this expanded network to give greater weight to the Global South on issues ranging from development finance and supply-chain resilience to energy, food security and technology.
The summit will also feature representatives of wider regional groupings, including ASEAN, the African Union, GCC, CELAC and the Eurasian Economic Union.