Editorial 2/1/2023

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has traveled to South America. But not only the Ukraine war accompanies him there, but the geopolitical competition with China, too. His interlocutor Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former and new president of Brazil, not only pitched himself and China’s President Xi Jinping as peace brokers with Moscow. He also has an almost outdated optimistic view of the People’s Republic, as Amelie Richter analyses. But China has long since been more strategically independent of individual South American states than it was during Lula’s first presidency.