Deep disagreements over the battles in Gaza and Ukraine prevented the G20 finance ministers from issuing a united statement at the end of their first meeting of the year on Thursday, according to officials.
The host nation, Brazil, has a bold plan to address inequality and climate change while leveraging its rotating G20 leadership to strengthen the voice of the global south.
However, that was eclipsed by what it referred to as a “impasse” during the two-day gathering in São Paulo. “It isn’t possible (to reach) a final statement,” Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told a news conference. “The impasse, as usual, is over the ongoing conflicts,” he said, without explicitly mentioning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or Israel’s military campaign against Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip. “We had nurtured the hope that more sensitive geopolitical issues could be debated exclusively” by the group’s foreign ministers, who held a meeting in Rio de Janeiro last week that likewise failed to produce a joint statement. According to Haddad, the G20 group, which accounts for 80% of the world economy, is united on financial matters. At what Brazil had anticipated would be a meeting focused solely on economic policy, he added, “but since the meeting last week in Rio de Janeiro didn’t reach a joint statement, that ended up contaminating the establishment of consensus”.
