Antidemocratic Politics and Regional Powers’ Multilateral Foreign Policies: Comparing Brazil and Türkiye

Abstract

This paper explores how the world crisis currently affecting liberalism and democracy has impacted Brazil’s and Türkiye’s foreign policy in three multilateral issue areas: security, human rights, and climate change. Assuming that a country’s foreign policy echoes the interplay between international and domestic dynamics, it considers two cases of similar escalation of antidemocratic domestic politics – the Bolsonaro administration (2019-2022) and Erdogan’s first mandate as Türkiye’s president under presidentialism (2018-2023). By means of a comparative methodological framework, it showcases that Bolsonaro and Erdogan may look very similar in their opposition to some (not all) Western and liberal values; however, they adopt different strategies to express their opposition, and neither one rejects multilateralism. The paper analyses their distinct geopolitical motivations in foreign policy based on different conceptions of how states should act in and for development.

Antidemocratic politics; foreign policy (Brazil and Turkey; climate change; security; human rights

Introduction

In today’s world geopolitics, both Brazil and Türkiye undergo a critical juncture whose legacy may seriously change each country’s global reach and regional leadership capabilities. Both countries have gone through in-depth domestic turmoil and are now at the crossroads of international disputes between both the USA and China, Western countries and Russia, requiring strategic decisions with unprecedented economic, technological and geopolitical implications. This paper contributes to scholarly literature on the role of non-Western regional powers aiming to change their international status and ascend globally (Acharya 2018; Stuenkel 2016; Terhalle 2011; Duarte and Milani 2021) and assumes that a country’s foreign policy in multilateral organizations echoes the interplay between international and domestic dynamics.

Dialoguing with scholarly literature that tends to homogenize authoritarian governments’ international behavior around labels such as ‘populist foreign policy’ and ‘populist leadership’, without necessarily relating these political contexts with a theory of action and a theory of the state (Destradi and Plagemann 2019; Wehner and Thies 2021), this paper showcases how this interplay matters in understanding how Bolsonaro and Erdogan were confronted with domestic turmoil and adopted similar antidemocratic policies at the national level, although their respective governments showed variations in the way they conducted foreign policy in three multilateral domains: security, human rights, and climate change. We have selected these domains because they reflect key material and symbolic dimensions of power in the analysis of both states’ foreign policy; in addition, they showcase variations in foreign policy behavior that are worth analyzing and discussing, which we do in the third section, below. Our main research question is the following: considering two cases of similar escalation of antidemocratic and authoritarian domestic politics – the Bolsonaro administration (2019-2022) and Erdogan’s first mandate as Türkiye’s president under presidentialism (2018-2023) – how does the domestic-international interplay explain foreign policy variations in multilateral fora?

Methodologically, this paper proposes a comparative framework between Brazil and Türkiye. Comparing the similarities and differences between political phenomena across countries and governments allows to judge if, when and how contexts matter, but also to assess the pertinence of theoretical models dealing with how states’ domestic decisions may affect their multilateral foreign policies. Such a comparison entails the examination of how institutions, both hard (formal rules and organizations) and soft (practices, political culture), vary between states (Badie and Hermet 2001; Beasley et al 2013; Mény and Surel 2009). Based on the analysis of official documents, foreign policy speeches, decisions taken during the two mandates, and bibliographic review, we aim to capture meanings and contents of national trajectories and focus on the comparison of variations in Brazil’s and Türkiye’s foreign policy decisions. As Marijke Breuning (2007, p. 19) recalls, “comparisons of smaller numbers of cases allow for more detailed analyses of similarities and differences among both the independent and dependent variables of the cases”. Through this comparison, we show that Bolsonaro and Erdogan may look very similar in their opposition to some (not all) Western and liberal values. However, they adopt different strategies to express their opposition; they also present distinct geopolitical motivations in their foreign policy decisions concerning three multilateral agendas based on different conceptions of the roles of the State in development, while at the same time not rejecting multilateralism.

Why do we compare Brazil and Türkiye? First, because these countries do not fully accede to a Western-centric order, and they do not consider that they thoroughly benefit from the established liberal international order, which does not necessarily imply a foreign policy of fundamental rejection (Alexandroff and Cooper 2010; Duarte and Milani 2021). They are both non-Western intermediate powers which may adopt moderately revisionist foreign policy behavior; they are regionally relevant, part of the intermediate per capita revenue group of countries, and members of the G20. Brazil and Türkiye are amidst the world’s most unequal societies, and their middle-income developing economies are confronted with challenging socioeconomic problems and internal regional disparities. While they both manifest some sort of geopolitical dissatisfaction, they also showcase regional and international leadership and negotiation capabilities, both having traditional foreign services and a history of national diplomacy (Milani 2021). Comparing both cases may allow us to understand if and how the crisis of the Western-based, international liberal order is also connected with how the configuration of international orders organize power and norms.

Second, civil-military relations also showcase an interesting commonality in Brazil’s and Türkiye’s political development: military coups have historically interrupted democracy-building efforts all along the 20^th century in both nations. In both countries, the Armed Forces have played important political roles and developed close ties with the Western strategic thinking, military schools and officials. Nevertheless, today’s responsibilities and functions of the military seem to express different domestic expectations and international ambitions: in the Turkish case, the conflict in Cyprus, the Syrian war, the conflicts between Israel and Palestine or between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the refugee crisis and the Kurdish question are examples of regional instability and security threats that scale-wise do not exist in Brazil (Kara-Szabó 2023; Spohr and Silva 2017). Since the end of the dictatorship the Brazilian military have constitutionally kept key roles in domestic public security policies during international events (for instance, the 2014 World Football Championship and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro), but also in the ‘pacification’ in urban slums and in the protection of the Amazonian environment. In addition, Brazilian military have also engaged with international humanitarian and peace operations, as in the cases of Haiti and the border between Venezuela and Brazil (Hirst 2009). It is also worth noting that some groups from military started to seek political prominence in both countries. In Türkiye, in the aftermath of the 2016 attempted coup, military officials gained more power within Erdogan’s government and contributed to a deepened authoritarian wave at the domestic level, also having important implications for the country’s foreign policy (Çalışkan 2018). In Brazil, a growing authoritarian nostalgia, pro-military campaigns and alleged perceptions of efficiency and anti-corruption of the Armed Forces steered the significant participation of officials in the Bolsonaro administration (Milani 2022).

Third, both states occupy large territories of sizable geopolitical magnitudes. Türkiye is a historical bridge between East and West, a member of the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and its national territory is crisscrossed by oil and gas pipelines. Brazil is a continental mass dominating half of South American lands, the owner in 2024 of the second largest crude oil reserves in Latin America and the Caribbean, an environmentally mega diverse country owning 60% of the Pan-Amazon rainforest but situated under the umbrella of USA hegemony.

Finally, Brazil and Türkiye also partake another common feature of great relevance to understand foreign policy decision-making: both countries play important diplomatic roles, ranking among top-10 countries in terms of number of embassies, missions and professional diplomats, despite deep-seated cleavages within their elite members. In a nutshell, in Brazil this cleavage refers to cosmopolitan versus sovereignty-based world visions in both public and private sectors, alignment with the Western world versus a search for autonomy and a framing of the international that is less hegemonic and more multipolar (Duarte, 2019). Under President Jair Bolsonaro, cleavages have moved up steps of political polarization, including cultural, social and environmental domains that used to be part of a common denominator since the 1988 Constitution, such as the promotion of human rights, race-based quotas, gender policies, indigenous rights, the protection of the Amazon and natural reserves. In Türkiye, cleavages between the ‘secular’ Istanbul-based bourgeoisie and a fast growing religious-based (Muslim) bourgeoisie from the Anatolian lands have evolved since the early 2000s; they have produced different world visions between those who support democracy and a Turkish return to parliamentarism versus supporters of President Erdogan’s increasingly undemocratic control of political institutions, independent researchers, civil society organizations and the opposition media, and finally between those who uphold liberal economic development models versus a more state-centered paradigm (Oran 2023). In addition, the AKP, under Erdogan’s leadership, has promoted an important shift from an emphasis on interdependence and bridge-building towards a more assertive quest for autonomy, often associated with military interventions and “coercive diplomacy” (Kutlay and Onis 2021, p. 1087).

Bearing these methodological issues and selection criteria in mind, this paper is organized around three sections, as follows: (i) Understanding the route for change: the Brazilian context; (ii) Türkiye between East and West: values and interests; (iii) Comparing trajectories and outcomes in Brazilian and Turkish foreign policy towards key multilateral agendas. The concluding remarks wrap up the main argument and introduce future research directions.

1. Understanding the route for change: the Brazilian context

Brazil has a plural society in cultural and ethnical terms, with a diversified economy that is reflected in the country’s trade mainly focused on the European Union, China and the United States. Brazil stands out when it comes to demography, territorial extension, and gross domestic product, but it still copes with deep inequality and deep social and environmental challenges. All these features explain why Brazilian political elites usually perceive foreign policy as a relevant tool for the country’s development and search for autonomy, status and prestige (Lima 2021). Political elite members tend to associate having a voice in global governance with promoting national interests. However, the desire to be a global player contrasts to its material capacities: Brazil is a non-nuclear state and holds an intermediate position in the international hierarchy of power; therefore, its elite members acknowledge that multilateral organizations are key arenas for Brazilian diplomacy.

With the advent of the authoritarian regime established in 1964, the military governments consciously downgraded Brazil’s voice and role in multilateral institutions aiming at restricting channels that could be mobilised for denouncing human rights violations (Albaret 2014). Since re-democratization in 1984, civilian governments have strengthened the country’s multilateral diplomacy. In the transition to the 21^st century, Brazil developed a stronger role at multilateral fora, including the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, but also within informal groupings such as the G-20, the IBSA (India, Brazil and South Africa) Forum and the BRICS+ group.

Brazil’s multilateral diplomacy shifted again in 2019. Fed by the dissatisfaction regarding the neoliberal capacity and the globalization trends to deliver their promises, antidemocratic movements surfaced in Europe, North America, Asia, the Middle East and Brazil. Such movements and leaderships hold their singularities, according to the region and national socioeconomic factors, but they find a common ground on a myriad of features that form a complex and intertwined amalgam consisting of authoritarian, ultraconservative, rhetorically nationalist, antiscientific, denialist, racist and xenophobic banners (Luiz et al 2024). A reactionary social subjectivity and thinking had already developed in Brazil prior to Bolsonaro’s electoral victory, but the national context was fed by this transnational far-right wave, which found a fertile ground in an on-going political and economic crisis that culminated in the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 (Nery et al. 2024).

The Bolsonaro administration was a watershed in Brazil’s multilateral diplomacy, discontinuing a set of post-dictatorship trajectory of decisions and positionings, especially when it comes to promoting norms and establishing coalitions. Such a change drew from how the government perceived the role of foreign policy, more oriented towards a domestic audience and less concerned about the international realm and its players. The local-international nexus is key to understand how ideas and actors from the far-right gained momentum and ground in Brazil’s context of crisis. It is also relevant because Donald Trump’s government created an alternative for Brazilian foreign policy under the Bolsonaro administration (Luiz et al. 2024). The two last years of Trump’s mandate overlapped with the two initial years of Bolsonaro’s, when the government of the United States was a clear international support and a political patronage. Bolsonaro’s government saw in the potential outcomes of a foreign policy that was subservient to US interests an opportunity to go around or even outperform the negative effects that a new Brazilian role in multilateral fora could bring about. Curiously, the extreme-right propaganda managed to sell the idea that submissiveness should be supported on behalf of nationalist and patriotic motivations.

To understand the changes in foreign policy that will be further explored in the third section of this paper it is key to look at how different global crises, such as the climate emergency and the pandemic, reverberated on Brazilian domestic policy. Under the Bolsonaro administration, foreign policy was mainly considered an electoral tool (Luiz et al. 2014). Because of its declaratory dimension, foreign policy was used to echo ideas and narratives that sought to satisfying Bolsonaro’s domestic coalition of support, thus maintaining his electorate ecstatic. Brazil’s foreign policy at multilateral fora was no longer based on political, health, environmental and economic goals of a developing country and an intermediate power, it was rather used to prioritize the diffusion of ultraconservative banners, especially seeking to reach the domestic public. This is how Brazil started to fight poorly defined (and fanciful) ideas in the multilateral arena, such as “cultural Marxism” and “globalism”, which the government claimed to be the root of all evil against liberal, Western and Christian principles and lifestyles.

2. Türkiye between East and West: interests and values

This section addresses how Türkiye under Erdogan, irrespective of similar challenges in its domestic politics, has built different foreign policy trajectories and outcomes. After years of frustrated negotiations with Brussels and despite its NATO membership, Ankara looked East and may eventually become a key ally within the Russian and Chinese axis of security and development (Insel 2017). Two important external changes related to AKP’s domestic consolidation of political power: the global economic crisis in 2009 challenging the American hegemony globally and regionally, and the 2011 Arab Spring, which affected Türkiye’s national security and foreign policy choices. These two international factors coincided at the domestic level with AKP’s increased capacities to consolidate its political power and to dialogue with its main religious and economic constituencies, particularly in the Anatolian region. AKP started to progressively replace liberal values by an Islamic identity as part of its main political backbone, thus deeply affecting Türkiye’s foreign policy decisions towards Western nations and multilateral debates around human rights and gender.

Foreign relations between Türkiye and the European Union are key to understand these changes. Center-right Prime Minister Ozal had reactivated Türkiye’s accession process by formally applying for membership in 1987. Tansu Çiller, Türkiye’s first and only woman who became Prime Minister to date, signed the Customs Union agreement with the EU in 1995. Center-leftist Bülent Ecevit received the status of a candidate-country in 1999 (Onis 2014). Therefore, regardless of their political spectrum, different governments had sought EU membership, but it was under AKP that Türkiye fulfilled the Copenhagen criteria and in 2004 the EU agreed to start negotiations (Sahin 2020). As Ziya et al. (2019) recall, transformations in the global political economy, the EU’s declining appeal in its periphery, its internal dynamics and multiple crises, but also the appeal of strategic capitalism development models, among other factors, may explain why Turkish elites have changed their geographic priorities in resolving dilemmas related to the regional-global nexus (Onis and Kutlay 2019).

In addition, the dissolution of the former Soviet Union had given Ankara more political space not only in the Middle East, the Balkans and in Central Asia, where Türkiye cultivates cultural ties with Turkic strategic elite members; it had also affected Ankara’s geopolitical perspectives in relation to NATO. The end of the Cold War did not mean the end of conflicts in the region: the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Nagorno-Karabakh war, the Chechen war, the Yugoslavian civil war, the Israel-Palestine conflicts and the Syrian war, the Kurdish question, among others, are key examples of how war-prone the Middle East has become since the 1990s (Ozcan 2008). That explains why foreign affairs minister Ahmet Davotoğlu (2009-2014) aimed to position Türkiye into the heart of global and regional politics, thus converting it into a pivotal player. For instance, following the 2008 Türkiye-Africa Cooperation Summit with the participation of 49 African countries, a series of Türkiye-Africa summits were organized as part and parcel of a strategic vision of development cooperation under the coordination of the Turkish International Cooperation Agency (TIKA).

Since 2009, Türkiye has gradually signaled a going-East move, attempting to build more strategic relations with Russia. If at the beginning of the AKP era, the Turkish government had worked to improve relations with the EU and to avoid antagonizing Washington, after 2009 and particularly in the aftermath of the July 2016 attempted coup d’état, Erdogan’s foreign policy has been based on an ultraconservative and religious form of nationalism, but also on the diversification of economic and strategic partnerships. The media and the government have placed under suspicion Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish preacher and businessman living in the USA since 1999. There were also allegations by Ankara that Washington intelligence networks would have been involved in the attempted coup. Since then, Erdogan has sought more autonomy from NATO and Western-led development models, thus putting what seems to be an end to the European illusion (Jarbour 2017; Kutkay and Onis 2021).

3. Comparing trajectories and outcomes in Brazilian and Turkish foreign policy towards key multilateral agendas

This section explores how the interplay between the ongoing crisis of the Western liberal order and antidemocratic politics in Brazil and Türkiye may produce distinct positionings of both states in multilateral fora. Methodologically, this paper selected three key multilateral and transversal agendas to further analyze the two countries’ different trajectories and outcomes: international security, human rights, and climate change, agendas that reflect both material and ideational dimensions of power. Contrasting the outcomes should allow us to understand if, how and why countries with similar domestic features may end up having different reactions in face of the international crisis of democracy and liberalism.

In the Brazilian case, at the very beginning of his term, between January 2019 and December 2022, Bolsonaro had to promote institutional adjustments to pave the way for changes in foreign policy, starting with the Ministry of External Relations. Bolsonaro chose Ernesto de Araújo as his minister and appointed other junior ambassadors to replace senior ambassadors at key positions due to what the Bolsonaro administration perceived as diplomats ideologically aligned with former governments. In addition, in exchange for governability and political support within the federal Legislative branch, the Bolsonaro administration used foreign policy and diplomacy to respond to demands stemming from the military, agribusiness, and neo-Pentecostal churches (Luiz et al. 2024).

The rejuvenated intensity of participation of these actors was also facilitated by the two ministers, Ernesto de Araújo (between January 2019 and April 2021) and Carlos França (between April 2021 and December 2022), who were young ambassadors lacking skills to outweigh political pressure in domestic negotiations (Silva et al. 2024). Therefore, the military became very prominent in several ministries, secretariats and federal agencies, thus influencing – directly and indirectly – the making of decision related to the international security regime. In addition, agribusiness groups, which also exercised control over the Ministry of Environment, gained ground in the climate change agenda; and religious-based alliances conquered a relevant role in human rights negotiations (Luiz et al. 2024).

In Türkiye, the 2017 referendum promoted a constitutional change from a parliamentary system to presidentialism, giving the president full executive powers and maximum two five-year mandates. Counting on the support of far-right National Action Party (MHP), AKP’s Erdogan was elected in June 2018 and then inaugurated as Türkiye’s first president under this new system one month later. He began his term confronted by a range of social, political and economic challenges, such as the state of emergency in place since the July 2016 failed coup d’état; the incarceration of thousands of civil servants, scholars, and opponents; the enduring Kurdish question; rising interest rates, inflation and the backslide of the Turkish lira against the US dollar. He reduced the number of ministries and strengthened secretariats under the presidency. As a result of spreading authoritarian features of the political regime, human rights violations increased under Erdogan’s mandate also as part of discursive justification strategies for the use of repression, thus contributing to the regime’s domestic legitimation and durability (Caman 2021).

Considering such domestic institutional and political changes implemented by both Bolsonaro and Erdogan, how have the two governments acted in the three selected multilateral agendas? First, as far as international security is concerned, Brazil has a long-dated history of participation in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). It is the second-ranked non-permanent member more frequently elected after Japan. However, Brazil’s mandate started in 2022, when Bolsonaro’s presidential term was almost finished. The Russian invasion of Ukraine (on 24^th February 2022) dominated the debates in the UNSC during that period, which gives little opportunity to analyze Brazilian political stance in other security topics. Brazil’s votes at the UNSC in 2022 indicated that the country’s diplomacy maintained the alignment to the United States regarding the Russia-Ukraine war, confirming the hypothesis that Brazilian diplomacy historically perceives that the political costs of challenging the hegemon in this regime are significantly high, especially considering the strong asymmetry between Washington and Brasilia and the fact that Brazil lies within USA area of influence (Milani, Pinheiro and Lima 2017). Regarding Türkiye, the last time that the country was elected as a non-permanent member was in 2009 and 2010, since Arab countries strongly opposed Ankara in the 2014 UNSC elections. Therefore, we have not considered UNSC votes in our analysis.

Nevertheless, significant changes can be perceived at the regional level. The Bolsonaro administration played a key role in dismantling the main multilateral security institution in the region, the South American Defence Council, an important branch of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). UNASUR had been created in 2008 and it was considered the main regional organisation where South American countries could debate regional issues without Washington’s explicit control. The military and extreme-right leaders perceived UNASUR as ideologically contaminated by left-wing and anti-American ideas and goals. As a result, on 19 April 2019, Brazil withdrew from UNASUR. The day after, Bolsonaro announced the establishment of the Forum for the Progress of South America (PROSUL), a new organisation that would replace UNASUR; however, PROSUL never flourished.

The Bolsonaro administration’s pursuit of a stronger alignment with the United States came hand-in-hand with this change in regional security politics. During the visit of Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to the Brazilian Northern border, some players who were close to Bolsonaro demonstrated that they would agree to participate in a USA-led intervention in Venezuela. Fighting against the Maduro regime could foster the domestic narrative of fighting against left-wing symbols, leaders and governments in South America. In this case, the military became a veto player, foiling such plans of a joint intervention against Caracas.

In the case of Türkiye, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) is the main multilateral regional alliance of which Ankara has been a member since 1952. However, compared to most of the other NATO members, Turkish historical, demographic, social, cultural, and political differences are substantial. These dissimilarities are aggravated by geopolitical challenges, such as an historical tension with Greece (another NATO member), disputes in the Black Sea, and borders with conflict-stricken regions or separatist groups, such as the Kurds. This context alone leads to different interests and worldviews compared to other NATO members. Ankara’s recent trajectory of rejection by the European Union, several denunciations of human rights violations and conditionality conditions posed by Western European parliamentarians against Türkiye have worsened this scenario. It is symbolic, but diplomatically relevant to recall the incident at the 2017 joint military exercise in Norway, when a picture of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was displayed among emblems of enemy states and leaders that the alliance would hypothetically fight against during that simulation (İnat and Duran 2023).¹

Moreover, because NATO’s decisions must be consensual, Türkiye often appears as a dissonant voice and a veto player. It was the case, for instance, in 2022 when it originally opposed Sweden and Finland to join NATO. The Erdogan administration made public Ankara’s dissatisfaction with NATO’s response to domestic issues in Türkiye, such as the response to migratory crises as a consequence of conflicts in the Middle East and to the humanitarian in the aftermath of earthquakes in 2020 and 2023. Ankara has also strengthened military ties with non-NATO countries, as illustrates, for instance, its decision to move on with the USD 2.5 billion purchase of Russian S-400 air defense system, rather than the one developed by a Western competitor. Ankara has also become a key producer of strategic drones. After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when the US and European countries have systematically elected Russia as one of the biggest threats to NATO, Türkiye choses to adopt a different approach, warning against the alliance’s expansion and hosting peace summits to negotiate the end of the conflict (Tuysuzoglu 2023).

Second, on the climate agenda, the Climate Action Tracker rates Brazil’s Paris pledge as “insufficient”, meaning that it is not consistent with the goal to limit the planet’s warming to below 2º C.² Brazil is among the top-10 largest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs), and partners with other countries in negotiating blocs at the UNFCCC, such as BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) and ABU (Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay). Its profile of emissions is highly associated with the role of agribusiness, land-use and deforestation, responsible for near 75% of Brazil’s emissions in 2021. On the contrary, its electricity production is highly dependent on renewable sources such as hydro, solar and wind energy. Brazil’s stance in multilateral climate change negotiations changed significantly under the Bolsonaro administration, mainly due to the role of the military, the agribusiness and extractive mineral sectors. Starting with the agribusiness, its influence over the Ministry of Environment resulted in strategies that aimed at obstructing climate policies (Milani, Pinto and Facini 2024). A less-committed environment policy would facilitate the expansion of areas destined to agribusiness and predatory practices, including the use of pesticides, and illegal practices of mining and wood extraction in protected and indigenous areas. The motivations behind these sectors are different from the military’s rationale. Nevertheless, these actors find common ground in obstructing climate policies in the multilateralism.

Due to the weight of the Amazon rainforest and territory in Brazil’s defense policy, the military also influenced the climate change agenda, by fostering a stance averse to negotiations. The military supported a narrative that could read as follows: the protection of the rainforest and pro-climate policies were seen almost exclusively either as an excuse for international powers and NGOs to intervene in the Brazilian territory or as a strategy to prevent Brazil from pursuing its own development. Brazil gave up hosting the 25^th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) in 2019. Bolsonaro explained that this decision was influenced by an initiative called “Triple A”, proposing the creation of an ecological corridor encompassing the Andes-Amazon-Atlantic region. He strongly opposed this “initiative” because it would place Brazil’s sovereignty at risk (Luiz et al. 2024).

Also, the Bolsonaro administration changed the methodology to calculate Brazil’s NDC, thus creating more room for future carbon emissions. Narratives denying the emergency and relevance of climate change became usual in multilateral fora. In 2019, during his speech in the UN General Assembly, Bolsonaro blamed the national and international media for spreading wrong perspectives regarding the Amazon’s deforestation. One year later, on the same platform, he once again accused the press of lying about deforestation.

Türkiye is among the top-20 largest emitters of GHGs. Its power industry, Türkiye’s largest source of emissions, is strongly dominated by fossil fuels. The Climate Action Tracker rates Türkiye’s Paris pledge as “critically insufficient”, indicating that its national climate action and its energy strategy are inconsistent.³ Ankara does not belong to any negotiating bloc at the UNFCCC, but it benefits from a status of “special circumstances”, which in fact led off the Turkish diplomacy to join the UNFCCC in 2004.⁴ This status benefitted the Turkish economy during the Erdogan administration, which continued its focus on its energy foreign policy, even though economic expansion implied an increase of GHG emissions during his term between 2018 and 2023. Ankara had submitted its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) in 2016, when it signed the Paris Agreement, but has only ratified it in 2021. The country is expected increase its emissions steeply; its NDC indicates a pledge to reduce emissions by “up to 21%” until 2030.

The decision to increase the country’s energy supply was key to the country’s economic development but was also associated with the exploitation of domestic coal mines. The mining sector is an important industry that has for several years given political support to the AKP. This was not different during Erdogan’s government between 2018 and 2023, although this option for coal was totally at odds with multilateral climate policies. The justification given by the administration was the country’s dependence on imported oil and gas (mainly from Russia), leading to concerns over Türkiye’s high level of exposure to geoeconomics interests and the volatility of prices in the global commodity market. A staggering figure, approximately 74% of the country’s energy sector depends on imports, with several (existing and planned) oil-gas pipelines cutting across the Turkish territory (Kara-Szabó 2023). This is to stress that the domestic dimension of the energy policy, involving the support of coal miners, is not only related to climate policies, but also to security. In fact, Ankara’s geopolitical position at the intersection of numerous conflict-laden regions has compelled the Erdogan administration to reconceptualize security also in terms energy security, climate change, and sustainability. For instance, Azerbaijan became the largest investor in Türkiye over January-March 2019, a first in history. This was mainly due to the launch of Star Oil Refinery, operated by Azerbaijani state-owned oil firm Socar (Kaygusuz and Toklu 2023; Yılmaz 2023).

Third, concerning human rights, changes were noticeable in both cases. Brazil was a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) during all the years of the Bolsonaro administration. In this regard, for religious reasons and because of growing criticism of groups regarding the efficiency of public security policies, the Bolsonaro administration fostered the reframing of human rights: the idea was that human rights were being wrongly used by left-wing movements around the world to encourage promiscuity and other forms of behavior that intentionally undermined Christian morality, and to protect criminals instead of punishing them for their practices of illicit activities (Author et al 2023). Counting on the support of religious groups, first changes in foreign policy were symbolic, including the prohibition of the word “gender” and its replacement with “sex” in all official documents (Klein and Carvalho 2024).

Brazil’s role in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) was also rapidly affected. Under the aegis of “promoting and preserving the family”, Damares Alves (Bolsonaro’s minister of women, family and human rights) was active in the UN to vote against resolutions dealing with women’s rights, LGBTQIAPN+ rights, family control initiatives, and anti-torture policies. Given its votes, the Bolsonaro administration sided with other illiberal and authoritarian governments, leading to Brazil’s participation in a Trump administration-led initiative in 2020, the Geneva Consensus Declaration. This document presented the main ultraconservative agendas of the global antidemocratic and authoritarian wave and were echoed in other multilateral forums, such as the III Demographic Summit and at the Ibero-American Congress for Life and Family. In a nutshell, the Bolsonaro administration decided to keep an active role in the UNHRC, but reframed Brazilian official priorities, strategies, and alliances to change the content of diffused norms (Conde et al. 2024).

In the Turkish case, Erdogan had set up in 2016 the Human Rights and Equality Institution of Türkiye (HREIT). In its wake, the country was prone to continuous violations of human rights and an erosion of freedom, a paradox that is explained by Turkish scholars within the framework of “human rights appropriation” strategies that adopt an exclusively State-centric and ultraconservative approach to human rights, thus embracing cultural relativism, undermining the rights of women and gender minorities, and giving priority to state security over the rights of citizens (Kayaoğlu and Gülel 2023).

Türkiye was never a member of the UNHRC between 2018 and 2023. In addition, when the Erdogan administration was challenged by opposition parties and lost local elections in 2019, the Turkish government decided to withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, known as the Istanbul Convention, illustrating the steps taken by an authoritarian leadership for its political survival (Bayar 2024). In January 2020, the UNHRC examined the Turkish report during the third cycle of the Universal Periodic Review, and High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, stated that she encouraged Ankara to “continue developing a comprehensive national human rights action plan (…) in close consultation and collaboration with all stakeholders, in particular the national human rights institution and all civil society organizations (…)”. She also encouraged Türkiye to support the establishment of an effective National Human Rights Institution in line with the highest international standards”.⁵

In a nutshell, three main considerations emerge from our comparative analysis. First, the two cases epitomized the worldwide authoritarian turn in domestic politics in close interaction with international power shifts, both globally and regionally. Erdogan (2018-2023) and Bolsonaro (2019-2022) were clear-cut examples of leaders who, despite having been legally elected, supported divisive, ultraconservative and polarizing social and political banners in complex societies crisscrossed by ethnic and racial diversity, regional disparities, and massive economic inequalities. In both cases, these leaders emerge from a paradoxical political context wherein historical attempts to build a secular state had been implemented throughout the 20^th century. Both presidents blamed liberal political values, underrated democratic institutions and reframed their multilateral stances according to their interests, thus satisfying their own political circles and popular support. Many of their foreign policy decisions were aimed to conquer the hearts of domestic audiences, even if some decisions had negative impacts on national economic, social and environmental development (as in the case of anti-China narratives in the Bolsonaro administration).

These are some of the similarities illustrated by the comparison between the domestic trajectories of the two countries; however, at least one difference is strikingly noticeable: in Brazil the trajectory from democratic rule of law and pluralistic governance to a model of government that threatened the demos and ignored progressive civil society organizations implied a change in leadership that followed a controversial process of impeachment and an anti-corruption campaign with clear features of lawfare. In the Turkish case, there was no leadership change. When Erdogan began his term that we analyse in this paper, he had already been in power, either as prime minister or president without official executive powers (before the constitutional change) since 2002. In his trajectory, Erdogan showed a sense of opportunistic flexibility in continuously adjusting himself from democratic ruling into an increasingly authoritarian role model, thus being able to marginalize liberal components from the government’s support coalition and decision-making.

Second, internationally speaking both Erdogan and Bolsonaro implemented nationalistic policies which were economically outward-looking, but their conceptions of the role of the State in development and their framings of the world order were quite different. Bolsonaro and his Finance Minister, Paulo Guedes, ignored the lessons of the 2008 global financial crisis and, even within the Covid-19 pandemic context, fostered an extremely orthodox neoliberal vision of State-market relations. This bet showed dreadful results in Brazil’s fight against the coronavirus: in the middle of the pandemics, late 2020, the death rate rose from 2 to 3.3 percent, plunging Brazil into an unprecedented health emergency; until the end of the pandemics, the country lost approximately 700 thousand citizens, showcasing how the linkages between austerity economic policies, authoritarian leadership, and uncertain health policy decisions produce calamitous responses to global challenges. Moreover, Bolsonaro’s world vision was almost exclusively rooted in a US-led hegemony, an anti-China perspective, the defence of Christianity and what one of his ministers, ambassador Ernesto Araujo, used to frame as the true values of Western societies. Such pledges sometimes jeopardized trade interests of many economic sectors in Brazil, whose profile of international trade is very diversified, China playing a key economic role.

Erdogan, on the contrary, implemented regulatory and development policies more in line with a state capitalist model, illustrating a political economy shift with clear implications in the configuration of domestic institutions (Kutlay, 2019). This movement in terms of economic policy making may have represented a deep-seated change in Türkiye’s trajectory, since liberal ideas had until very recently dominated Turkish economic thinking. Although civil-military governments had practiced some forms of interventionism in the 1960s and 1970s, the Washington Consensus had been very influential in Turkish politics between the 1980s and the first decade of the 21^st century. Trade-wise, however, this movement has not changed the fact that Türkiye is still closely related to Europe (İnat and Duran 2023). Although China and Russia have increased their economic partnerships with Türkiye, European countries are still very relevant in economic terms.

Thirdly, geopolitically, the Turkish bet on an alternative to the Western world seemed to be associated with changes in its political and economic model (Altunişik 2023; Ciftci 2023). Brazil’s bet on such a change towards diversification, particularly under the PT administrations, had not prospered, and may be part of Lula’s agenda in his new presidential mandate, which must be analysed in the coming years. Designing a security alternative to the Western world was impossible all along the Cold War era and after it, mainly due to Brazil’s geographical situation in the US area of direct influence, but also due to the domestic opposition of main strategic elite members who have always considered Brazil as “another West”, different from, but part of the Western world. When governments thought of foreign policy alternatives (in the 1960s, the 1970s and more recently under the PT administrations), they were associated with economic development, trade opportunities and negotiations, diversification of alliances with other Southern powers, and the need to reform global governance as well as multilateral institutions.

In this regard, both countries have been conceptually conceived as “awkward powers” (Abbondanza and Wilkins 2021), meaning states which portray unique capabilities and unconventional international behaviour in international politics, states whose status seeking diplomacy produces mismatches in analyses inspired either by traditional power transition theory or by middle power categories (Kara-Szabó 2023; Rezende and Wilkins 2021). Under these lenses, Bolsonaro’s foreign policy towards the three multilateral agendas that we analysed in this paper was not that of an “awkward power”, since he did not attempt any bet on autonomous graduation; instead, he used to propose foreign policy conducts that were amicable to the maintenance of the US hegemony regionally and globally. Erdogan’s Türkiye, on the contrary, implemented foreign policy decisions in a regional context full of geopolitical threats, and in a historical juncture wherein power concentration is much higher than power diffusion. During the Cold War era, especially as it allied itself with the Western bloc and had to play a strategic role in containing former USSR pressures in the region, social development issues seemed to have less weigh on the politics of Türkiye’s foreign policy. Under Erdogan (2018-2023), this was not the case anymore: Türkiye was then on a geopolitical track much closer to China and Russia than to the USA and Europe, showed different motivations for challenging multilateral institutions in the fields of security, human rights and climate change, at odds with Brazil under the Bolsonaro administration (2019-2022).

Conclusions

This paper contributes to understanding relevant variations in democratic backlash in two key regional powers. It showcases that authoritarian leaders such as Bolsonaro and Erdogan may prefer to adopt suboptimal foreign policies to legitimize their engagement with domestic audiences. This means that personal leadership matters, but they must be analyzed in association with domestic coalitions of support. Erdogan has shown a portray of a pragmatic chameleon along the many years he has been in power, whereas Bolsonaro is an emblematic profile of a contemporary ideological, authoritarian and ultraconservative leadership who is still very active in social networks of misinformation and denial campaigns. This paper confirms that political leaders matter to understand a state’s foreign policy trajectory and outcomes, but contextual variables and the interplay between domestic and international politics inform how much political leaders can do and under what conditions (Kutlay and Karaoğuz 2023; Ülgül 2024).

In addition, we believe that our study renders explicit the need to produce convergences between foreign policy analysis, particularly in the case of regional powers situated in the semi-periphery of the international system, and theoretical constructions about the international order and its making. Motivations of states and leaders may differ, states and leaders may have different conceptions of the role of the state in and for development. Understanding such variations is of great relevance to theorize the ‘international’, and future research agendas should consider the framing that we have proposed in this paper to analyse foreign policy behaviour of other regional powers, such as India, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia or South Africa, where antidemocratic politics and the promotion of ultraconservative values in moral and religious realms may emerge through less uniform formats and homogenized blueprints over the years.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the following grants: CNPQ 306986/2023-0 and FAPERJ E-26/200.973/2021 (Carlos R. S. Milani); CNPQ 308626/2022-2 and FAPERJ E-26/200.229/2023.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Dec 2024
• Date of issue
  Nov 2024

History

• Received
  17 June 2024
• Accepted
  18 Oct 2024