Surprise accession by Indonesia to BRICS boosts economy and credibility of bloc

Indonesia quietly and unexpectedly joined the BRICS bloc last week, bringing the number of full members to 10 and substantially boosting the group’s combined economy by over 5% to more than $28-trillion, just beyond that of America, a symbolic achievement. 

Adding Indonesia also arguably boosted the credibility of BRICS’ claim to be a representative body of the non-aligned Global South, rather than a Russia-China support group, as its critics suspect Moscow and Beijing are trying to turn it into.

Indonesia, the largest economy in Southeast Asia, becomes the first nation in that region to join the original five members – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – as well as Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates, which were admitted as members at the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg in 2023.

Warm welcome

Jakarta’s decision to join has been warmly welcomed by the other BRICS members. It offsets the embarrassment caused by Argentina declining the invitation to join in 2023, and Saudi Arabia neither accepting nor declining 

The accession of Indonesia, announced only last week by the current Brazil chair, surprised outsiders. It is not clear why it took so long. Brazilian officials said that the five founding BRICS members had offered Indonesia membership as far back as the Johannesburg summit in August 2023, along with the other new members. 

Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Yuri Gripas / Pool)

But Indonesia had then asked for more time to formally respond because national elections had been looming, they said. These elections were held in February 2024, and Prabowo Subianto replaced Joko Widodo as president. But that was almost a year ago. 

Elizabeth Sidiropoulos, national director of the SA Institute of International Affairs, said Indonesia’s joining reflected a shift in Indonesia’s foreign policy under new president Subianto. She said under Widodo, Indonesia had sought to join the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a grouping of developed countries.

But Sidiropoulos said she thought that option was still on the table and it could be that Indonesia was pursuing a multi-alignment strategy, like India. 

She saw Indonesia joining BRICS as a positive development, noting that during its G20 presidency in 2022, “Indonesia was quite adept at navigating between global powers, and I don’t think it’s a country that will seek polarisation over mutual benefit.

“It brings into the grouping an important Southeast Asian economy.”

‘Asset to bloc’

Sanusha Naidoo, senior research fellow at the Institute for Global Dialogue (IGD), agreed that adding Indonesia was an asset to BRICS. She thought the delay in announcing the accession might have been because Indonesia had decided to join only after the election of Donald Trump as US president. 

US President-elect Donald Trump. (Photo: Valerie Plesch / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

This had added to the uncertainties of the global environment, particularly because of Trump’s threats to resort widely to increased trade tariffs. This might have prompted Indonesia to seek greater security in the BRICS alliance. 

She said Indonesia joining had significant strategic implications both for itself and for BRICS. It provided impetus to BRICS as a body representing the interests of the Global South. 

As Indonesia was a member of the G20, it increased the leverage of BRICS in that global forum. She also noted that Indonesia added weight to the BRICS non-aligned posture because of its historical role in hosting the 1955 Bandung Conference, which laid the foundation for the Non-Aligned Movement in the Cold War. 

Arina Muresan, a senior researcher at IGD, said she believed BRICS might also have chosen Indonesia from all the contenders for strategic reasons. She noted that in a time of rising geopolitical uncertainty, Indonesia commanded the Strait of Malacca, the shortest sea route between China and India, which is extremely busy, especially with oil tankers from the Middle East. 

After the Johannesburg summit when BRICS announced its first new members, Jim O’Neill, the British economist who coined the BRICs concept in 2001, told Daily Maverick that the new members had not “dramatically boosted” the total economic clout of the bloc.

He said he was puzzled that Indonesia had been left out despite its large economy and its success in navigating internal and global challenges, arguably better than any other major commodity producer.

Added clout

Now that omission has been corrected. Indonesia has added clout. Its $1.371-trillion GDP in 2023 boosts the combined BRICS GDP by 5%, from $27.416-trillion to $28.787-trillion. That, incidentally, pushes it above the $27.720-trillion of the US economy. 

The BRICS share then reaches just over 27% of the $106.171-trillion global economy. This is all in nominal dollar terms. 

In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms – which measures what a country’s currency can buy domestically, Indonesia’s GDP of $4.334-trillion boosts the total BRICS GDP of $66.862-trillion by even more, by about 6%, to $71.197-trillion. That increases the share of the combined BRICS economy to about 36% of the global GDP of some $ 185.696 trillion in PPP terms. 

The addition of Indonesia’s population of 282.47 million also boosts the total BRICS population by nearly 8% from 3.546 billion to 3.828 billion – which then constitutes more than 47% of the world’s population.

Indonesia also boosts the land mass (excluding territorial waters) of BRICS by about 5.4%, from 33,597,435km² to 35,409,006km².

Further expansion of BRICS seems likely. At the last summit in Kazan, Russia last October, Moscow announced that BRICS had offered “partnership” in BRICS to 13 countries. This included Indonesia which even then had not decided to become a full member. The other 12 were Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Algeria and Belarus.

Russia has since announced that Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan have accepted the invitations while the other four countries have not yet replied.

Partnership offers some, but not all the benefits of full membership, and is seen as being a stepping stone to full membership. DM