By Nellie Peyton, Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo and Madeline Chambers
JOHANNESBURG/BERLIN (Reuters) -Germany said on Thursday that it would seek to persuade Donald Trump to reverse his decision to exclude South Africa from next year’s G20 summit in Florida following the U.S. president’s false claims that the country mistreated its white minority.
Since taking office for a second time in January, Trump has repeatedly alleged that South Africa’s black-majority government persecutes its white population. In May, Trump confronted President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House with widely discredited reports of a genocide of white farmers that has also been mentioned by Trump’s South African-born ally Elon Musk.
Washington boycotted the G20 leaders’ meeting in Johannesburg this month, citing “human rights abuses” in South Africa. The group adopted a declaration addressing the climate crisis and other global challenges, despite U.S. objections.
Trump said in a Wednesday social media post “South Africa has demonstrated to the world they are not a country worthy of membership anywhere” and that he would not invite it to next year’s summit.
Ramaphosa’s spokesperson Vincent Magwenya told Reuters that “a lot” of G20 members had sent private messages of support to South Africa, without identifying specific countries.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said publicly that he would seek to persuade Trump to extend an invitation to South Africa.
“In my view, the G7 and G20 are formats that should not be made smaller without good reason,” Merz told reporters in Berlin. “I will try to convince him (Trump) to invite the South African government as well.”
SOUTH AFRICA SAYS WON’T BE CANVASSING OTHER G20 MEMBERS
Ramaphosa’s office said South Africa would continue to participate in the G20 and “does not appreciate insults from another country about its worth in participating in global platforms”.
However his spokesperson said South Africa would not lobby individual nations for support.
“We … understand and appreciate that at a bilateral level, some of these countries are in a precarious sort of position with the United States,” Magwenya told local radio station 702.
In his Wednesday post, Trump cited as a reason for excluding Pretoria from G20 meetings that it had refused to hand off the G20 presidency to a representative from the U.S. Embassy at the end of the Johannesburg summit.
South Africa says the U.S. delegation was not present at the summit and that the presidency was handed over to an embassy official this week.
U.S. COULD DENY VISAS TO SOUTH AFRICAN OFFICIALS
It is unclear how Trump could formally exclude South Africa, a founding member of the G20, from the next summit. Sikho Luthango, a researcher at the Cambridge University Institute for Sustainability Leadership focused on the G20, said the U.S. could deny its representatives visas.
The diplomatic standoff adds pressure to ongoing U.S.-South Africa trade negotiations, already strained by Washington’s imposition of a 30% tariff on imports from South Africa in August – one of the highest in Africa.
In February, Trump also signed an executive order to cut U.S. financial assistance to South Africa, most of which went to the fight against HIV/AIDS.
(Reporting by Nellie Peyton, Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo Colleen Goko; Additional reporting by Madeline Chambers in Berlin; Writing by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo; Editing by Philippa Fletcher)
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