Abstract This study analyses whether Brazilian foreign policy under Lula successfully legitimised the country's international identity as a rising power in the eyes of the domestic and international media. Based on a constructivist framework, we have applied French Discourse Analysis to a corpus of 36 official addresses by the President of the Republic and the Minister of Foreign Relations and 137 news articles from four news outlets, two Brazilian and two international, concerning two diplomatic episodes deemed representative of Brazil's quest for greater pre-eminence: the leadership of MINUSTAH (2004) and the Nuclear Deal signed with Iran and Turkey (2010). Results show that official discourse characterises Brazil's identity as a rising power chiefly by South-South diplomacy, while media discourse was more heterogeneous, being the discursive formation of each news outlet determinant in explaining their interpretation of Brazil's international identity.