G20 Information Centre provided by the G20 Research Group
	@g20rg G20 Summits |  G20 Ministerials |  G20 Analysis |  Search |  About the G20 Research Group [English]  [Français]  [Deutsch]  [Italiano]  [Portuguesa]  [Japanese]  [Chinese]  [Korean]  [Indonesian]

Analysis

Plunging Prospects for the Rio Summit’s Performance the Day Before

John Kirton, Director, G20 Research Group
November 18, 2024

On November 17, 2024, the day before the G20’s Rio Summit started, prospects for its performance suddenly took a severe turn for the worse. It was reported that Argentinian president Javier Milei, on arrival in Rio having just met US president-elect Donald Trump in Florida, instructed his sherpa to change Argentina’s long-established positions to reflect Trump’s view on several critical key subjects in the negotiations on the leaders’ final communiqué.

On ambitious climate action, backed by much more climate finance, Milei and his sherpa refused to agree, arguing that Trump’s America would never agree to that. The Argentinians objected to references to the Paris Agreement’s promise to “stay united in the pursuit of the accord’s goals,” and to any mention of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development. 

On taxation of the very wealthy, the Argentinians resisted text that they had already accepted at the October meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, where all had agreed to “work together towards a fairer, more inclusive, stable and efficient international tax system fit for the 21st century, restating our commitment to tax transparency and fostering global dialogue on effective taxation, including of ultra-high-net-worth individuals.”

On gender equality, they also disagreed.

This compounded the burden on all the leaders’ sherpas, who were still struggling to find consensus language on Russia’s war against Ukraine.

The draft communiqué that Brazil’s host sherpa team had prepared and circulated for its partners’ final approval suddenly unravelled, as the leaders’ personal representatives were forced to go back to the beginning on many issues to seek wording on which all could agree. They did not succeed, leaving Brazil to negotiate with its obstructionist Latin American next-door neighbour.

This raised the prospect of no fully agreed outcome document from the Rio Summit leaders at all – now due not to divisions between G7 members and Russia over its aggression against Ukraine, but between Milei and the rest due to his veto on many of the social equality and ecological sustainability issues central to the Rio Summit priorities, agenda and success. At best there might be only a chair’s statement or summary from President Luiz Lula da Silva, which would not bind the other members in any politically meaningful way, as had been done in a few of the G20 ministerial meetings earlier during Brazil’s presidency. In either case, this would be the first time in G20 summit history, since the leaders’ first meeting in 2008, with no agreed outcome document at the end. It would mean the failure of the Rio Summit and also, perhaps, even of the G20 summit institution as a whole, as Trump will represent the US at the leaders’ table himself for the following four years, and the US is due to host the G20 summit in 2026, and thus become part of the governing troika when he was inaugurated on January 20, 2025.

However, there was another better option, and possibility. The Rio Summit could produce an agreed outcome document from the leaders at Rio, with a separate statement or a footnote that Argentina disagreed and was not bound by specific identified passages. This was done at the last G20 ministerial meeting under the Brazilian presidency, when the culture ministers met on November 8, and has been done since the 2022 Bali Summit. That would reflect the fact that the G20 summit is not a formal “unite veto” system in which any individual member can prevent agreement, but an informal consensus body in which it usually takes two members objecting to stop any passage or agreement in the leaders’ communiqué. And although the G20 was designed as a club of equals, in practice Argentina and Milei are far less powerful and influential that all the other G7 and BRICS members. And none of these others is likely to want to have the highly unpredictable Donald Trump lead them into his dark valley of global governance, even before he joined them as the legally empowered president of the US.

So the promising prospects for the Rio Summit’s performance remain, if now in a more precarious position than before Donald Trump’s agent arrived to provide a big speed bump or even roadblock on its eve.

[back to top]