Leaders of the BRICS bloc, made up of major developing countries, have agreed on mechanisms for considering new members, South Africa said on Wednesday, paving the way for dozens of interested countries to join the group, which has pledged to support the “Global South”, Reuters reported.

The enlargement deal could help boost the global influence of the BRICS, which now consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, at a time when geopolitical polarization is fueling efforts by Beijing and Moscow to turn them into a viable counterbalance. West.

“We have reached an agreement on the issue of enlargement,” South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor told Ubuntu Radio, a radio station run by his ministry, after BRICS leaders met for a three-day summit in South Africa.

“We have a document that we have adopted that sets out guidelines and principles, processes for considering countries that want to become BRICS members… It’s very good,” Pandor said.

BRICS expansion was the main issue on the agenda of the summit in Johannesburg.

While all BRICS members have publicly expressed support for the bloc’s expansion, leaders have disagreed over how much and how quickly.

Member countries also have economies that differ widely in scale and governments that often share few common foreign policy goals, making consensus-based decision-making difficult.

China’s economy, for example, is more than 40 times larger than that of South Africa, Africa’s most developed country.

Pandor did not elaborate on the criteria for considering the candidates, saying only that the bloc’s leaders would announce the expansion before the end of the summit on Thursday.

WORLD DEVELOPMENT CHAMPION

More than 40 countries have expressed interest in joining BRICS, South African officials say, and 22 have submitted formal applications to join.

They represent a disparate group of potential candidates, from Iran to Argentina, motivated in large part by a desire to level the global playing field, which many see as rigged against them, and attracted by the promise of BRICS to rebalance the global order.

“The world is undergoing great change, division and regrouping… it has entered a new period of turbulence and transformation. Development is an inalienable right of all countries. It is not a privilege reserved for a few,” said Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has long pushed for an expansion of the BRICS group.

Despite being home to around 40% of the world’s population and a quarter of global GDP, the bloc’s ambitions to become a global political and economic player have long been hampered by internal divisions and a lack of a coherent vision.

Russia, isolated from the United States and Europe by the invasion of Ukraine, is eager to show Western powers that it still has friends.

On the other hand, Brazil and India have established closer ties with the West.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva on Tuesday rejected the idea that the bloc should try to compete with the rich economies of the United States and the G7. However, moves to expand the bloc and promote a new development bank as an alternative to established multilateral lenders are causing some concern in the West.

Werner Hoyer, head of the European Investment Bank, warned the West on Wednesday that it risks losing credibility in the “Global South” if it does not urgently step up its own efforts to support poorer countries.