Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the radical leftist President of Brazil, is against Venezuela’s prospective entry into the BRICS bloc, several Brazilian outlets reported on Monday.

According to the reports, Lula’s alleged stance against Venezuela’s entry into the group is in response to socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro’s fraudulent July 28 presidential election.

BRICS, an anti-American trade and security bloc led by China, is presently holding its annual meeting hosted this year by Russia, the group’s current chair, in the city of Kazan. Lula was slated to travel to Russia on Sunday but canceled his attendance after he suffered significant head trauma on Saturday. Lula will instead address the bloc through a videoconference sometime this week.

One of the subjects that the coalition will address in Kazan is potentially inviting more member nations.

The bloc – originally consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa – voted in 2023 to expand, inviting six new countries: Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Argentina, and Ethiopia. President Javier Milei, a fierce anti-communist, declined the invitation, while Saudi Arabia has not finalized its membership at press time, leaving its prospective entry ambiguous.

Venezuela, ruled by the socialist Maduro regime, is among the nations vying for a prospective spot in the anti-U.S. bloc. On Monday, Lula’s top foreign policy advisor Celso Amorim gave an interview to CNN Brasil in which he opposed Venezuela’s entry to BRICS.

“I’m not advocating Venezuela’s entry. I think we have to go slowly. There’s no point filling it up with countries, otherwise it will soon create a new G-77,” Amorim told CNN Brasil.

According to Lula’s advisor, BRICS needs to be “expanded with countries with profiles that can contribute within the context of a ‘polarized and multipolar’ world” – suggesting Venezuela is not among those countries.

“The entry of new countries has to be very well studied. You need countries that can contribute. Have a strategic conception of admissions,” Amorim said. “Remember that the world is going through days of wars with the potential to escalate into world wars. So the admission criteria are more important than the country itself.”

CNN Brasil reported, citing anonymous diplomats, that allowing Venezuela into BRICS is a point of contention in the coalition.

“There is a possibility that Brazil will veto the country because of the stance adopted by the Chavista government in this year’s elections. Brazil demanded that the electoral minutes be presented, but Nicolás Maduro’s regime never released them,” the report read.

“On the other hand, the political calculation that Brazilian diplomacy has been making is to what extent a formal veto by Brazil would be seen as a break with the neighboring country and also whether the veto would have any practical effect, given that China, Russia and Iran have been advocating Venezuela’s accession,” the report continued.

According to CNN Brasil, Brazil “has shown more interest” in having Colombia and Cuba join the bloc.

Lula, who previously served for two consecutive terms between 2003 and 2011 before returning to power in January 2023, historically maintained friendly relations with the Venezuelan socialist regime under the rule of late dictator Hugo Chávez. Chávez once stated that he forged a friendship with Lula during the 1990s, long before either had been elected president.

Lula’s friendly ties with the Venezuelan regime continued under current socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded Chávez in 2013 after he died of an undisclosed form of cancer. Lula restored Brazil’s diplomatic ties with the Maduro regime in 2023 after his predecessor, conservative former President Jair Bolsonaro, cut ties during Venezuela’s 2019 political crisis.

The friendly relationship between Lula and Maduro appears to have strained in the aftermath of Venezuela’s fraudulent July 28 presidential election, which Maduro insists he “won” without proof. The Venezuelan opposition has presented evidence to the international community it claims can demonstrate its candidate Edmundo González — a 75-year-old diplomat now exiled in Spain — defeated Maduro in a landslide.

Lula, alongside Colombia’s Gustavo Petro and Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was part of a group of leftist presidents who called for Maduro to present evidence of his alleged victory, which he never did.

By late August, Lula claimed that he recognized neither Maduro nor González as winner of the election and called for a redo, which both the ruling socialists and the opposition rejected.

Other Brazilian outlets, such as G1 and Poder 360, similarly reported this week that Lula’s alleged position against Venezuela’s entry into BRICS is in response to Maduro’s disregard for his position on the sham election.

A report published by the left-wing Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo last week claimed that the Brazilian government has practically “thrown in the towel” regarding Maduro’s fraudulent election. The report claimed that the Brazilian Foreign Ministry entered “damage containment mode” in its relations with Venezuela and does not expect Lula to attend the dictator’s inauguration on January 10, 2025.

Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro has spent the larger part of the past decade unsuccessfully courting BRICS. In September 2023, during the bloc’s 15th summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, Maduro made a new push to gain entry into the group, offering Venezuela’s vast oil resources as well as farmland that the ruling socialists seized from private ownership over the past two decades — and then ran to the ground — to the bloc’s members.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.