Argentina’s Milei channels Donald Trump at G20 Rio summit ahead of SA meeting in 2025

President Cyril Ramaphosa got a preview this week of what it could be like to have Donald Trump loose at your G20 summit when Argentina’s populist right-wing president Javier Milei threw something of a tantrum at the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro. South Africa takes over the G20 presidency from Brazil after the summit and will host the 2025 summit in Johannesburg.

Milei — who caused some embarrassment to South Africa last year by declining a public invitation from the Johannesburg BRICS summit to join that club — refused to sign on to several aspects of the 85-point G20 Rio de Janeiro Leaders’ Declaration, which the other 18 countries and the African Union and European Union adopted as the outcome of the Rio meeting.

The firebrand leader objected to several socioeconomic interventionist measures which had been proposed by his neighbour, the left-wing Brazilian President Lula da Silva, including a 2% tax on billionaires’ incomes; several measures to try to ensure the world achieves the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals; regulation of hate speech on social media; and a greater role for global institutions like the UN.

Read more: Brazil and SA must lead G20 push against global inequality and climate injustice

For the libertarian Milei, the proposal to tax dollar billionaires — of whom there are about 3,000 in the world — might have been the most offensive, although it was the one which Ramaphosa most welcomed during a press conference after the summit.

In the end, Argentina signed the Rio declaration, while noting its disagreements. Ramaphosa, evidently relieved, expressed his satisfaction with that outcome and even took some credit for it.

Without naming Argentina, he said one country had dissented from some aspects of the final leaders’ declaration but had in the end not objected to the declaration being adopted, which he suggested it could have done because G20 decisions have hitherto been adopted by consensus.

Ramaphosa hailed the adoption of the Rio declaration despite Argentina’s dissent as a success for the South African notion of “sufficient consensus”. This was adopted during the multiparty negotiations for a democratic dispensation between 1990 and 1993. Sufficient consensus then essentially meant agreement between the outgoing apartheid National Party and the ANC.

SA ‘joined at the hip’ with US

According to media reports, Milei stepped in to object to parts of the declaration — including the tax on billionaires — after Argentine officials had already agreed to them, prompting accusations from other G20 countries that he was being deliberately disruptive. He had visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida before the summit and perhaps that inspired him, it has been suggested.

Some observers saw Milei’s performance as ominous: “As world leaders at the G20 summit in Brazil are bracing for the return of U.S. President Donald Trump to the center of global affairs, one head of state in the room has given them an early taste of a familiar, iconoclastic right-wing style,” Reuters wrote in its account of his performance.

At the press conference in Rio, Ramaphosa was asked how he would manage to work with Trump at his G20 summit next year and also in the handover of the G20 presidency, which the US will take in 2026.

Looking rather resigned to his fate, he said: “I look forward to working with President Trump.”

He noted that the Trump administration would be part of the troika — along with SA and Brazil as the outgoing presidency — which organised the Johannesburg summit.

“We will have to work together. We will be joined at the hip,” he said and that would be for two or even three years. Ramaphosa added that he had already invited Trump to pay a state visit to South Africa — presumably when he comes for the G20 summit.

US officials told Daily Maverick that chairing the G20 presented a great opportunity for South Africa to engage with Trump and his administration, which might otherwise neglect South Africa as they rather did during Trump’s first term in the White House from 2017 to 2021.

Towards SA’s summit

Ramaphosa hailed the Rio summit as “very successful” and said it had laid a solid foundation for SA’s presidency of the G20, which would be built on the themes of solidarity, equality and sustainability.

He said the Rio declaration focused on addressing the concerns that Lula had identified, such as global poverty and hunger, energy security, reform of global governance, sustainable debt and workers’ rights.

He particularly hailed the Global Alliance against Poverty and Hunger which Lula launched at the summit and also welcomed the G20 Social Summit which Brazil hosted before the government leaders’ summit, to engage with civil society. Ramaphosa said SA would also hold a social summit as it had a tradition of engaging with civil society.

“There was no avoidance of thorny issues,” Ramaphosa added, noting that the wars in Gaza and Ukraine had been mentioned.

However, most commentators observed that the declaration was much more a statement of good intentions than an action plan. Regarding Gaza and Ukraine, the focus was very much on improving humanitarian access and no blame was attached to anyone for causing the humanitarian disasters.

Read more: SA’s leadership of G20 will not succeed ‘without engagement with Ukraine’, says ambassador

Although the declaration pledged reform of the UN Security Council, including enlargement of that supreme body of global governance to increase the representation of unrepresented or underrepresented regions such as Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, there was no mention of actually increasing the number of permanent seats on the Security Council for those regions.

Read more: Why South Africa should spend more money on the G20

Sanusha Naidoo, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue, said South Africa’s priorities of inclusivity for marginalised communities, inclusivity around the development agenda and the reform of multilateral institutions were reflected in the Rio summit declaration.

“I think those are the key priorities that South Africa will take forward and especially around cross-cutting areas like food security.”

Naidoo said she thought SA could do much more to align its current chairing and presidency of the G20 with the African continent’s priority need for peace and security since these were so necessary for development.

She thought SA would continue in its presidency to emphasise the themes of global governance reform, inclusivity, development and multilateralism and could take forward the Global Alliance against Poverty and Hunger, the G20 Social Summit and the mobilisation against climate change.

Naidoo added that the challenge for SA would be to find its own hook and not just build on what Brazil had done. DM