By the end of August, countries joining the acronym BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) reached the top in Johannesburg. Among its decisions, in 2024, the initiative to extend the partnership to six other countries has been the most popular. When Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia and Iran meet in 2024, a group of eleven members will account for 46 per cent of the world's population and 37 per cent of the gross domestic product.

This expansion may be the beginning of further enlargements and represents a new phase of the block. China and Russia, the strongest countries of the Association, want to build a real effective alternative to the political and economic hegemony of the West, presented as the leader of the Global South. They present the expansion of the bloc as an effort to achieve a more balanced and equitable global model. It must be borne in mind that the current global governance reflects the division of powers and economic relations of 1945 and that the current situation is very different.

Coinciding with the declaration of the international multipolar system II. The International Monetary Fund tailored to the winners of the World War, the reform of institutions such as the World Bank or the United Nations (UN), is one of the main objectives of the BRICS agenda. The members founded the New Development Bank – GBB – based in Shanghai in this direction, which aims to be an alternative to the above. This bank has had a simple path, as it has so far financed only 33 billion dollars in development projects. And the prospects for the future are not very good either, because the sanctions against Russia are going to hamper GBB’s path.

Another important point on the BRICS agenda is to deepen the dedolarisation of trade relations between states. Clearly, the possible success of this strategy would be a genuine explosion for the US dollar and the US economy.

The poor trajectory of the forum such as the G7, driven by the West, formed by the seven countries with the highest GDP, the failure of the last meeting of the G20 group and the lack of operability of the UN, make it easier for the BRICS bloc to assume the leadership of the Global South.

However, the BRICS block is not homogeneous, there are many interests among participants and they are often contradictory. The new expansion will undoubtedly accentuate this situation. The forum of the eleven Member States will be far from the cohesion level of the G7 group, for example. Its connection in the bathroom is, above all, a position contrary to the West. But strategic cohesion will be difficult to build, given that there are hostile countries such as China and India, or that Saudi Arabia or the UAE will have to reach an agreement with Russia or China.

The new era of the BRICS bloc could represent the beginning of the multipolar world, but it remains to be seen whether this path would be strong enough to question the hegemony of the present United States and official multilateral institutions. The existence of autocratic systems in most of the BRICS states being deployed is not an excuse for this forum to be portrayed as a useful tool for changing the United Nations model that today requires profound reform. Because, beyond the fact that the global political and economic model is unfair, it is dysfunctional in dealing with urgent problems such as security, poverty or the climate emergency.