Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on Monday harshly criticized the absence of Argentine President Javier Milei at the summit of leaders of the Southern Common Market held in Paraguay.
Speaking to reporters at the end of the day in Asunción, Lula described it as “an immense nonsense that a president of an important country like Argentina does not participate in a meeting like Mercosur” and considered that “it is sad for Argentina.”
At a summit in which Bolivia joined the block of countries made up of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, Milei’s absence was highlighted by several of the presidents, in addition to Lula, who admitted that the Mercosur is not going through its best moment.
Leaders of Mercosur member and associate countries met in the Paraguayan capital to discuss and outline central strategies for greater regional cooperation and integration.
Despite Milei’s absence, the first Argentine president to skip the meeting since 2001, when Fernando de la Rúa cancelled his trip to Montevideo due to the social and economic upheaval that was taking hold in Argentina at that time, Lula admitted that the other countries in the bloc continue to work towards integration, counting on Argentina.
“Argentina is an extremely important country for the success of Mercosur and whether the president participates or not is of no importance,” he said. The Southern Cone country sent its foreign minister, Diana Mondino.
“If Mercosur is so important, all the presidents should be here. I attach importance to Mercosur. If we really believe in this bloc, we should all be here,” stressed Uruguayan President Luis Lacalle Pou.
On the eve of the summit, the host president of Paraguay, Santiago Peña, who handed over the rotating presidency to neighbouring Uruguay on Monday, had already acknowledged that Mercosur, created in 1991, is not going through “its best moment”.
However, Peña advocated for rapprochement and respect between partners.
“I couldn’t get President Milei to come, but we have to be respectful of each country as well,” the Paraguayan president admitted to journalists, in a meeting where both foreign ministers and heads of state avoided making public statements beyond their interventions at the summit.
“The integration process does not stop. We face integration when there are challenges and we face them with more integration,” Peña added.
Earlier, Lula questioned in his speech to his peers in Asunción, without explicitly mentioning anyone, the “ultra-liberal experiences” in the region, where, he said, “false democrats try to undermine democratic institutions.”
The Brazilian president and Milei, who heads the two main economies of the South American bloc, have been at odds for several weeks, leading to an exchange of statements and straining diplomatic relations between Argentina and Brazil, its main trading partner.
“In the globalized world, it makes no sense to resort to archaic and isolationist nationalism. There is also no justification for reviving ultra-liberal experiences that have only aggravated inequalities in our region,” the Brazilian said in his speech at the summit.
In fact, when asked by journalists, Lula also referred to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a meeting point for the Latin American far right, in Balneario Camboriú, in southern Brazil, which Milei attended on Sunday.
“Doing something far-right is so disgusting, it is so antisocial, it is so anti-people, it is so anti-democratic. I don’t know what people gain by participating in this,” he stressed.
He also welcomed the results of the recent elections in the United Kingdom and France, saying he was “very happy” and considered that the curbing of right-wing tendencies in both countries was an important step forward.
“What happened in France is a wonderful thing about what democracy represents,” he said, adding that “when everything seemed to be going wrong, people demonstrated and took to the streets and said ‘we want democratic sectors to continue governing France, we don’t want the far right, we don’t want fascists, we don’t want Nazis, we want democracy.’”
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