Under the aegis of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the G20 met, although with the notable absence of Chinese and Russian presidents, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. This meeting resulted in a consensual final declaration, compromises having been found.
Here are the main announcements made during the meeting of the twenty most powerful countries in the world.
The G20 officially joined the African Union (AU), a strong signal for Africa and a diplomatic victory for India, which appears to be the leader of the countries of the South. The entry of the African Union into the G20 will offer “a voice and visibility” to Africa, the continent which today displays “the fastest growing”, and will allow it to assert its interests and points of view. seen within the body, according to Kenyan President William Ruto.
Based in Addis Ababa, capital of Ethiopia, the AU has 55 members (including six suspended), totaling $3 trillion in GDP. The continent was until then represented at the G20 by only one state, South Africa, whose President Cyril Ramaphosa said he was “delighted” with the place offered to the AU.
Deeply divided over the future of oil, the G20 failed to call for an exit from fossil fuels in its final declaration, but for the first time supports the objective of tripling renewables by 2030, a “bare minimum” three months before the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference.
The question of a possible exit from fossil fuels, the essential cause of the increasingly severe climate crisis, is this year at the heart of international negotiations expected to culminate in December at COP28 in Dubai.
The year 2023 is on track to become the hottest year on record for humanity. And an exit from fossil fuels without CO2 capture is deemed essential by the first assessment of the Paris agreement, published Friday by the UN Climate. The G7 approved the principle in the spring, while failing to set a timetable.
The United States pushed, during the G20, for an ambitious logistics corridor project linking India and Europe to the Middle East, with a leading role for Saudi Arabia. An agreement in principle was signed between the United States, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the European Union, France, Germany and Italy. “It’s really important”: commenting on this signing, the American president spoke of a “historic” agreement during a round table bringing together the leaders concerned.
Concerning Ukraine, if the final declaration denounces the use of force aimed at obtaining territorial gains, the text does not explicitly mention Russian aggression in Ukraine, an expression used in 2022 during the previous G20 summit in Bali in a reference to a UN resolution which deplored in the strongest terms the aggression committed by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
Narendra Modi opened the G20 behind a plate where his country was identified as Bharat, the strongest signal to date of a potential change of the official name India, inherited from the colonial past. India and Bharat are the two official names of the country under its Constitution, Article 1 of which begins: India is Bharat.
The word Bharat dates back to ancient Hindu texts written in Sanskrit. But members of the BJP, the ruling Hindu nationalist party, have previously campaigned against the use of the name India, which has roots in Western antiquity and was imposed by the United Kingdom.
Hindus make up the overwhelming majority of India’s 1.4 billion people, but many religious minorities, particularly the more than 200 million Muslims, fear Modi wants to turn the country back into a Hindu nation.