RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AFP) — Brazil’s new Government after weekend elections will have a raised diplomatic profile to match its booming economy, thanks to efforts by outgoing Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, experts say.

Lula’s strategy of ensuring Brazil was friends with all nations, especially its South American neighbours, while boosting ties with developing economies has borne fruit, they said.

Brazil now carries greater weight in the United Nations, the World Trade Organisation, environmental summits and groupings such as the G20, thanks to tireless work and co-operation between Lula and his foreign minister, Celso Amorim.

“Lula wanted to strengthen the G20 and weaken the G8, which he considered illegitimate because it excluded emerging nations,” Amado Cervo, professor in international relations at the National University of Brasilia, said.

“He managed that, to an extent,” in that the G20 became more cohesive. “But strategic power is closed, the G8 is more closed,” Cervo said.

Lula’s dream of seeing Brazil elevated to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, however, came to naught.

That was through no misstep on Lula’s part, but rather because “that power club doesn’t want to expand, doesn’t want to share around the power”, the analyst said.

David Fleischer, an analyst at the University of Brasilia, agreed that the incoming Government to be decided after today’s elections would have the same difficulties in trying to effect a reform of the UN Security Council, despite unabated ambitions.

“Brazil is part of the BRIC, along with China, India and Russia. But there are interests there that undermine access to a reformed Security Council. China wants to block Japan, India and Pakistan. In that mix, Brazil’s chances are diluted,” he said.

Brazil nonetheless has burnished its UN credentials by heading up the peacekeeping mission in Haiti since 2004.

And it is taking up other initiatives meant to underline its intent to gain the diplomatic clout commensurate with its economic might, notably trying to carve out a role as a neutral mediator in the Middle East conflict.

“The Middle East play was an attempt at becoming more important” on the world stage, Cervo said.

As well as trying to act as a go-between with the Israelis and Palestinians, Brasilia stepped in this year with Turkey to convince Iran to sign on to a nuclear fuel swap deal meant to avert UN sanctions.

The United States and its allies eventually rejected that deal, though.

Cervo said the next Brazilian Government would likely make less effort to win a seat at the big table of world powers.

Fleischer said Lula’s determined efforts to show Brazil was a friend of Iran’s, risking US irritation, was not set in stone for the incoming administration.

“What is happening internally in Iran” could rewrite that relationship

more than any international pressure, he said.

Despite some setbacks, the diplomacy as executed by Amorim and bolstered by Lula has forged a reputation for Brazil as a nation which deserved to be listened to.

One consequence of it has been Brazil’s positioning to be more independent of the United States.

The United States “expects Brazil to be a partner, but knows the country has become stronger in defending its own interests,” Hal Brands, an analyst for the US Army

War College, said in an interview with the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.

“This gives rise to conflicts in areas such as trade, and in relations with Iran and Venezuela,” he said.

Cervo noted that pushing integration of South America was a priority when Lula first came to power eight years ago, but that has since languished as a goal because of regional squabbles and lack of a defined plan.

Andre Pereira Cesar, an analyst at CAC consulting, said the favourite to win the presidency, Lula’s former cabinet chief Dilma Rousseff, would likely try to pursue her old boss’s diplomatic strategy.

If her main rival, former Sao Paulo governor Jose Serra, wins — against all the odds — then Brazil could expect “to return to give more priority to the United States and Europe”, he said.