AP
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The Group of 20 summit in South Africa concluded on Sunday with the conspicuous absence of the United States, which will next lead EU countries, after the Trump administration boycotted the two-day meeting involving leaders of the world’s richest countries and top developing countries.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, in keeping with G20 tradition, slammed his wooden gavel against a block like a judge to declare the Johannesburg summit closed. Normally, the gavel is handed to the next country’s leader to serve as rotating president, but no U.S. official took the gavel.
The world’s biggest economies boycotted a summit aimed at uniting rich and developing countries over President Donald Trump’s claims that South Africa violently persecutes its white Afrikaner minority.
In a last-minute decision, the White House announced that South African embassy officials will attend the G20 handover. But South Africa refused, saying it would be an insult to hand over Ramaphosa to a junior embassy official. According to South Africa’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the U.S. delegation was ultimately not allowed to participate in the summit.
South Africa said the extradition would take place at a later date, likely at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. President Trump has said he will hold next year’s summit at his golf club in Doral, Florida.
“The gavel of this G20 summit officially closes this summit and now it passes to the United States, the next chair of the G20, where we will meet again next year,” Ramaphosa said at the summit’s close, without mentioning the US absence in his speech.
The first G20 summit in Africa also broke with tradition on Saturday, issuing a leaders’ declaration on the first day of talks, instead of the one usually released at the end of the summit.
The declaration was significant in that it came in the face of opposition from the United States, which has criticized the group’s South Africa agenda for months, which focuses primarily on climate change and global wealth inequality, which the Trump administration has ridiculed. Argentina’s President Javier Millei, an ally of Mr. Trump, also said he opposed the declaration after he also missed the summit.
Other G20 countries, including China, Russia, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada, also supported the declaration, calling for increased global attention to issues that particularly affect poor countries, such as the need to finance recovery efforts after climate-related disasters, find ways to ease debt levels, and support the transition to climate-friendly green energy sources.
“South Africa has used this presidency to put African and Global South priorities firmly at the center of the G20 agenda,” Ramaphosa said.
After his speech, Mr Ramaphosa was hugged and congratulated by other leaders for hosting a summit that was overshadowed by the US boycott, but he could be heard saying on a hot microphone, which was not supposed to be broadcast, that “it wasn’t easy”.
South Africa defended the G20 declaration as a victory for the summit and international cooperation in the face of the Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy. However, the G20 Declaration is a general agreement among member states that is not binding, and its long-term impact has been questioned.
Additionally, although the Declaration contained many of South Africa’s priorities, some specific proposals were not included in the document. There was no mention of a new international panel on wealth inequality, similar to the United Nations-appointed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has been called for by countries such as South Africa.
The G20 was formed in 1999 in response to the Asian financial crisis and is made up of 19 rich and developing countries, the European Union and the African Union, but some have questioned its effectiveness in resolving the most prominent global crises, including the Russia-Ukraine war and tensions in the Middle East.
The 122-point Johannesburg Declaration only mentioned Ukraine once in its general call for an end to the global conflict, and even though the leaders of all major European powers, high-level delegations, the EU and Russia were sitting in the same room at the G20 meeting, the summit appeared to have made no difference in the nearly four-year war.
“This first meeting on the African continent is an important milestone,” French President Emmanuel Macron said, but added that African countries “struggle to have common standards on geopolitical crises.”
Still, some hailed the summit as an important symbolic moment for the G20.
“This is the first time in history that a meeting of world leaders has put the emergency of inequality at the center of the agenda,” said Max Lawson of Oxfam, an international non-profit organization working to alleviate global poverty.
“The importance of addressing development priorities from an African perspective cannot be overstated,” said Namibia’s President Netumbo Nnamdi N’Ditwa. The country of South Africa, with a population of 3 million, is one of more than 20 small countries invited as a guest to the summit, along with G20 members.
