Dilma Rousseff\u2019s run-off victory in Brazil\u2019s presidential election on Oct. 31 marks the beginning of a new era for Latin America\u2019s biggest nation.<\/p>\n
Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, known as Lula in Brazil, steps down after eight years in power. His presence in Brazilian politics is as old as Brazil\u2019s democracy itself: The former union leader has participated in every direct presidential election since democratization in the late 1980s. Lula became president on his fourth attempt, in 2002, and shaped Brazilian politics like no other in recent decades.<\/p>\n
Under Lula\u2019s watch, Brazil-Turkey political and economic ties have flourished, and cooperation has strengthened. Petrobras, Brazil\u2019s oil giant, has begun collaborating with the Turkish Petroleum Corporation (TPAO) in the Black Sea, and Turkish companies are increasingly eyeing the Brazilian market. In addition, Lula and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan have both agreed on the necessity to challenge existing geopolitical paradigms and involve new players to address global challenges more effectively. Last year, Lula was the first Brazilian president to visit Turkey, and a year later, Erdo\u011fan accepted Lula\u2019s invitation to visit Brazil.<\/p>\n
Yet Lula\u2019s successor, Dilma Rousseff, an uninspiring technocrat, is unlikely to focus on foreign affairs as much and may neglect it altogether as she faces formidable domestic challenges, such as urgent tax and pension reform. Brazil and Turkey are important allies in their quest to redesign global governance structures and assume more responsibility, and Erdo\u011fan must be more proactive and reach out to Brazil\u2019s future president if he wants to prevent relations falling back to the low level of the early \u201890s.<\/p>\n
Ties between Turkey and Brazil have traditionally been insignificant, largely due to geographical remoteness. Turkey\u2019s and Brazil\u2019s respective challenges were simply too different for a serious dialogue to emerge. After the end of the Cold War, as globalization picked up, both countries sought to diversify their economic and political relations and began to identify each other as potential partners. Turkey\u2019s S\u00fcleyman Demirel came to Brazil in 1995, which was the first official visit to Brazil by a Turkish president in history.<\/p>\n
Since then, bilateral ties have grown steadily, and trade between the two more than quadrupled since the turn of the century. One of the most promising possibilities for collaboration presents itself in the energy sector. Turkey hopes that the hydrocarbon reserves beneath the Black Sea might meet its growing energy requirements and reduce its dependence on imports, and Brazil\u2019s Petrobras offers one of the world\u2019s most sophisticated offshore drilling technologies. In 2006, Turkey and Brazil signed an agreement for the exploration of oil in the Black Sea, and Petrobras has invested several hundred million dollars since then in Turkey. In the same year, the Turkish-Brazilian Business Council was established on the occasion of the visit to Brazil of the then-minister of foreign affairs, Abdullah G\u00fcl.<\/p>\n
In addition to economics, both countries\u2019 geostrategic position is similar in that both Turkey and Brazil are emerging but not yet well integrated into international structures. Brazil\u2019s and Turkey\u2019s collaboration on dealing with Iran\u2019s nuclear ambitions may have been lambasted by the international community, but the situation showed that current structures are not conducive toward positively influencing Iran, and that there is a dearth of actors willing to assume international leadership.<\/p>\n
In its project to pursue an independent foreign policy, Brazil can be one of Turkey\u2019s long-term partners, and it is necessary to find ways to institutionalize ties so that they can be sustained even if one of the countries\u2019 leaders is tied down in domestic political projects, as may be the case with Brazil\u2019s new president, Rousseff.<\/p>\n
While the Brazilian-Turkish friendship has blossomed in the past eight years, there is still upward potential to strengthen it further. One possible way to do so could be to integrate Turkey into IBSA, a trilateral alliance of India, Brazil and South Africa, which serves as a platform to exchange knowledge on a vast array of topics ranging from HIV treatment and poverty reduction to agricultural technology. Turkey is certainly the most advanced of the four, but it has a lot in common with the other three. They are all stable liberal democracies in the midst of regions that are politically unstable at times. They are all \u201crising stars\u201d in the global economy.<\/p>\n
Finally, they are all willing to assume much-needed regional leadership and thus play a crucial role in the promotion of peace, economic development and human rights. In a world where an increasing number of national leaders look to China as an economic and political model to copy, Turkey and Brazil provide powerful counterexamples that political freedom is no obstacle to economic growth. Both countries must make use of their legitimacy more frequently by, for example, jointly calling on Zimbabwe\u2019s dictator Robert Mugabe to respect the unity government with Morgan Tsvangirai.<\/p>\n
Brazil-Turkey ties are likely to provide significant mutual benefits in the economic realm. In addition, they share a common vision about how to democratize the existing structures of global governance. Collaboration in these projects seems indispensable to assure success. With Mr. Lula gone, Turkey needs to assume leadership and continue to strengthen the Brazilian-Turkish friendship.<\/p>\n
*Oliver Stuenkel is a visiting professor of International Relations at the University of S\u00e3o Paulo and a fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin.<\/p>\n
11 November 2010, Thursday<\/p>\n
OLIVER STUENKEL TODAY\u2019S ZAMAN<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Dilma Rousseff\u2019s run-off victory in Brazil\u2019s presidential election on Oct. 31 marks the beginning of a new era for Latin America\u2019s biggest nation. Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva, known as Lula in Brazil, steps down after eight years in power. His presence in Brazilian politics is as old as Brazil\u2019s democracy itself: The former union […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":783839,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1526],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brazil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}