A few days ago, British magazine The Economist ran a piece called: 'Brazil's president is losing clout abroad and unpopular at home', highlighting how Lula da Silva's foreign policy is all wrong, and how he has become a very unpopular figurehead inside Brazil.

Lula pretends to meddle in issues that are not his to opine, pretending that the South American giant has influence in spheres where it has not. At the same time, The Economist criticizes him for not working on issues where he does have influence on, such as Venezuela and other trouble spots in the South American subcontinent.

Now, as the BRICS nations gather in Rio de Janeiro for the annual summit, the growth of the multipolar group is overshadowed by the fact that the two stars of the party – Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping – will not be present, emptying the event of much of its relevance, and reflecting poorly on Lula's foreign policy.

Putin is not present because Brazil is a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC), that has issued an arrest warrant against the Russian President.

The ICC is a very controversial transnational court, and neither the US, nor Russia or China are members of it – it's basically a court 'for suckers'.

Many countries have made sure to ignore the Putin warrant: Hungary openly announced that it would ignore the ICC to receive the Russian leader, and Mongolia effectively received him, despite being a member of the international court.

But unpopular Lula is not able to approve legislation in Congress, let alone a potentially controversial one like that.

With the absence of Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping announced that he was not attending. Why?

Conservative sources in Brazil suggest that Xi's absence is due to a diplomatic incident during Lula's trip to China, in which his controversial wife Janja – not a Brazilian official – interrupted the Chinese leader to bash TikTok for being filled with 'far-right' disinformation.

While this certainly didn1t help, the simpler explanation is that Xi is punishing Lula for the absence of Putin.