It feels like a big change could be coming

It has been quite a week. First we had ‘Lula’ – Luiz Inacio da Silva (as nobody but his mother ever called him) – defying everybody’s expectations. After winding up two million votes behind his challenger, Flavio Bolsonaro, in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election, he made a ‘miraculous’ comeback in the second round. It was like a man going into a revolving door behind you and coming out in front: at the end of the first round Lula was 2 million votes behind Bolsonaro; at the end of the second round last Sunday he was four million votes ahead. So how did he win a fourth term without cheating? That’s what Bolsonaro claims he did, having fled to the United States, and Trump, his mentor, hints at the same. But Lula’s victory was not ‘miraculous’: he had only learned to read when he was ten, and at 80 he still refused to have a mobile phone. They finally made him get one and use it. He wouldn’t do social media videos; they created a WhatsApp channel called ‘Lula’s Army’, and made him appear on it at least daily. The channel went from zero to 10.8 million viewers in two weeks, and Lula won. So Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father, who is serving a long jail sentence after mounting a failed coup attempt in 2025, will stay in jail. Flávio, who hoped to win in his stead, has fled to Florida to avoid charges of money laundering ($680 million from betting companies.) And Brazil, the second biggest country in the Americas (214 million), is still a democracy. The Amazon is safe for another four years. (Lula has already reversed much of the damage done by the senior Bolsonaro during his only term in 2019-23.) The aboriginal peoples will be protected, and Lula’s life’s work, rescuing an entire generation from poverty and ignorance, will continue. And on the same Sunday, Serbia’s authoritarian ruler bit the dust. Aleksandar Vučić has been president for 12 years so this time he was running for prime minister, but it was the same authoritarian regime depending on the same populist-nationalist grudges and lies. Vučić had run into a little trouble with a student movement angry at the pervasive corruption in Serbia, but he was friendly with the Trumps and the Russians so he figured it could all be sorted out with a snap election conducted under the usual conditions. He turned out to be wrong. The students deliberately had no leaders, no professional politicians and no agenda except ‘back to democracy and down with corruption’, but despite a menacing display of regime thugs on the streets the Student List won hands down. That makes two victories for democracy on the same day. Then Benjamin Netanyahu lost the Israeli election on Tuesday. The alleged war criminal and Israeli prime minister has ruled the country for all but eleven of the past 30 years, but the second-worst warmonger of our time may be going under. Making coalitions is especially hard in Israel because Jewish parties normally refuse to let Arab parties play, although 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs. Nevertheless, if you count their votes then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition actually lost the election. “I know how to count,” said Yair Golan of the centre-left Democrats, addressing the Israeli Arabs. “We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes.” Musician Yali Sobol put it even better in a Facebook post: “If you stop being racist, two amazing things will happen to you. First, you will stop being racist. Second, you will discover you have won.” Netanhahu is still in power and free to start more wars for at least three months. His wish list is Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon, and Iran (in partnership with Trump), not necessarily in that order. But this makes three wins for democracy, because he probably will go down in the end – and Donald Trump will lose badly in the US mid-term election, although he stays in office. Maybe it’s just the El Niño, but it feels like a big change could be coming.