Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks after winning the presidential runoff election, in Sao Paulo, Brazil, beating Flávio Bolsonaro. Photograph: Brian Snyder/Reuters
Leftist incumbent Lula says unprecedented comeback was a ‘defeat for denialism’ as Bolsonaro refuses to accept election result
With 100% of votes counted the 80-year-old leftist received 4.4m votes more than Bolsonaro, with a 51.79% share to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.21%. However, soon after Brazil’s electoral authority confirmed Lula’s victory, Bolsonaro refused to concede defeat and asked for the results to be annulled.
Lula narrowly lost the first round of the election to Bolsonaro in early October, casting his political future into doubt and plunging progressive Brazilians into three weeks of despair. Never, since the return of democracy in the 1980s, has the first round runner-up won the second vote.
But Lula did precisely that on Sunday, prompting joyous scenes on the streets of São Paulo, where he had been following events, and at the hotel where he was watching the count.
Addressing a packed crowd of ecstatic supporters in a São Paulo conference hall, Lula said: “We are going to change the way that this country is governed … This election was a defeat for denialism … I want to thank God and to thank you, Brazilian men and women of this country … it was democracy that made this happen.”
Roughly 400,000 students participated in mobilizations against policies imposed by Giorgia Meloni’s administration. Source: OSA/Facebook
Giorgia Meloni’s government announced the deployment of 500 military troops to Milan following a weekend of mobilization against austerity measures.
Giorgia Meloni’s administration has announced the deployment of 500 military troops to Milan after a weekend of intense protests and riots resulted in broken windows at luxury shops.
But while mainstream coverage has focused on exclusive brands hiding inventory from angry demonstrators, progressive organizations emphasize that the rage witnessed on the streets of several northern Italian cities is a result of the government’s own policies.
“A Louis Vuitton bag can cost €5,600, while the monthly maximum for the wage guarantee fund in 2026 is €1,340,” wrote the grassroots union Unione Sindacale di Base (USB). In a statement on Tuesday, the union cited devastating national statistics, including data showing that over 14% of working-class families live in absolute poverty.
Broken windows can be repaired, USB noted. “Five years of lost wages, an impoverished family, and a denied future cannot be recovered so easily.”
Students oppose austerity at school and beyond
Significant mobilizations preceded the weekend’s protests. On Friday, October 16, roughly 400,000 students flooded the streets for “No Meloni Day”. They criticized the government’s so-called securitization measures which in practice has meant stifling the right to protest, as well as the unabated turn toward war and armament.
Protesters warned that by prioritizing these points over public services and working conditions, Meloni and her ministers knowingly undermine the future of a whole generation.
Echoing developments in France, where teachers’ unions have supported students’ demands over recent weeks of historic struggle for a stronger public education system, educators in Italy began circulating appeals to do the same.
“The established order is the worst of all possible worlds – or comes very close to it – and our schools are a mirror of this: they are falling apart, alienating, militarized,” the appeal reads. “Places where the need to stretch one’s legs is labeled ‘indiscipline,’ and where the ‘foreigner’ is blamed for the decline in knowledge, rather than two decades of underfunding and neglect.”
Real solutions, not repression, needed to address social crisis
Trade unions, teachers, and students all denounced the repression authorities unleashed in response to the protests – both after mobilizations in cities and during school occupations.
“This government – incapable of offering solutions to the social crisis raging across the country – is once again attempting to manage the streets and social discontent solely through the lens of ‘public order,’ while intensifying repression and shrinking the space available for political activity,” emphasized youth organization Cambiare Rotta.
Students opposed the governments focus on militarization Source Cambiare RottaFacebook
Teachers specifically called upon others in the system not to endorse crackdowns on students while invoking democratic values. “Democracy today resists in the French and Spanish squares, in the occupied Italian schools, in the resistance to the genocide of the Palestinian people, in the words and deeds of those who oppose the piecemeal world war,” they wrote.
“It is not to be found in threats, in tear gas, in police officers inside schools, or in students maimed by the weapons of our law enforcement. It is not to be found in the unjust rules that too many persist in defending.”
The increased protest activity has given hope that the spark that inspired massive mobilizations throughout 2025 might resurface. It comes less than two weeks before a new general strike – and an international dockworkers’ strike in which Italian port workers are set to play a notable role – on October 30.
Comrades Gordon and Douglas with Cuban health officials
Communist Party leaders Alex Gordon and Lorraine Douglas deliver vital medicines in trip to besieged socialist island
ON THURSDAY a delegation from the Communist Party of Britain was received at Cuba’s Ministry of Public Health (Ministerio de Salud Publica) in Havana by Dr Henry Lopez Jimenez, Deputy Director of Public Health, a vetaran of Cuba’s Medical Brigades in Mozambique where he worked at the Central Hospital in Nampula.
The CPB delegation was led by general secretary Alex Gordon and party chair Lorraine Douglas and included Ben Woodward who is in Havana as part of a brigade organised by the Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos (ICAP), the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples.
Dr Henry Lopez Jimenez outlined the extreme privations that have been created in Cuba’s world renowned health system as a result of the US blockade and sanctions regimes.
Cuba’s infant mortality rate has increased as a direct consequence of the cruel and deliberate attack by the Trump administration on the Cuban people’s healthcare system. Cuban surgeons and nurses have been forced to complete medical operations using light from their own mobile phones during power cuts.
The CPB delegation presented the Cuban health service with over £2,000 of medicines including analgesic painkillers, anti-inflamatory tablets and other medical aid, an advance donation from the Aid for Cuba appeal recently launched by the CPB, which raised £32,000.
Comrades Gordon and Douglas with Cuban health officials