Article by Paul Rogers republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
From the US to Brazil, Israel and Serbia, the far right have been delivered a number of mammoth blows
In the wake of the US midterm elections, the sheer size of the electoral opposition to Donald Trump is still sinking in. It will take weeks if not months for a full analysis of the results to emerge but they are already having a global impact, with US tech companies losing $3.2trn in value since the vote on Tuesday.
Remember, though, the political focus barely two weeks ago was not just about the US midterms but how they related to three more elections across three continents, in Serbia, Brazil and Israel. In each case, there was uncertainty over the outcome but a recognition that it could have an impact stretching way beyond its borders.
Two of the elections came on the same day, 25 October, in Serbia and Brazil, and the third was in Israel just two days later. The first two were general elections in which the populations as a whole could cast ballots, but in Israel voting was restricted to seven million Jews and the two million Palestinians residing in Israel, with five million Palestinians living under Israeli control in Gaza and the West Bank excluded.
In Serbia, the Serbian Progressive Party (SBS) had been in power for 14 years and was dominant across much of society, including the media and economy, and with plenty of influence across the legal system. Its increasingly autocratic leader, Aleksandar Vucic, had long allowed persistent favouritism and a high level of corruption coupled with organised crime, and in the past two years a substantial community of student activists had demonstrated repeatedly against the SBS and Vucic, giving rise to an opposition Student List of candidates when it came to the election.
While the students had no clear leader, by the time of the election they were reportedly neck and neck in the polls with the government. When the election came, the Student List romped home, winning 53% of the votes, to the SBS’s 39%.
What comes next is uncertain as the List’s newly elected parliamentarians seek to establish a stable if inexperienced government. Critics fear that a combination of years of corruption coupled with the power of organised crime will ultimately dominate but that is by no means certain; many thousands of students, supported by hundreds of thousands of others, see the future very differently.
As the political environment in Serbia evolves, one thing remains certain, it has seen mass protest transform itself into a potential government. That will be watched uncomfortably by quite a few Western states, not least France, with its continuing country-wide street protests, and the UK, where over 4,000 pro-Palestine supporters have been arrested in recent years.
Mass action also applies to Brazil, where the progressive incumbent, Luiz Ignàcio Lula da Silva, failed to lead at the first round of the election, initially having fought a lacklustre campaign. The favourite to win the run-off was his right-wing opponent Flàvio Bolsonaro, a key Trump ally and the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, now imprisoned for his role in an attempted coup after losing the 2022 election.
The prospect of defeat led to a country-wide campaign of mass rallies by Lula’s supporters, with huge crowds gathering in cities right across the country. That was paralleled by far greater use of social media, an element that had not previously been prominent in Lula’s previous approach to campaigning.
Since the return to democracy in Brazil over 40 years ago, no candidate losing the first stage of a presidential election had reversed the result in stage two, yet Lula’s renewed campaign did just this, turning a two million voting deficit in the first round into a substantial lead in the second three weeks later, having gathered around 10 million extra votes.
Much of the change was due to internal politics, but it is at the global level that the result is of note. During his recent four-year term, Lula had made much of the need to slow the rate of destruction of the rainforest, which makes up one of the most significant global sinks of carbon. If Bolsonaro had won that would have been reversed, which would have been music to the ears of Trump and his supporters, as well as to climate change deniers across the world.
As to Israel, there are two main outcomes. First, Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition lost its majority, but Gadi Eisenkot’s Change bloc also fell short. Second, Palestinian Arabs allowed to vote did so in much greater numbers than usual, with a turnout of just under 80%, largely because of a determination to prevent Netanyahu contriving to cling on to power.
Overall, Arab-led parties won 19 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, including 11 for members of the Joint List alliance – enough to hold the balance of power. Ten days after the election, the Joint List announced it would support Eisenkot as prime minister, following in the footsteps of the other Arab group, Ra’am. Israeli president Isaac Herzog is now thought likely to invite Eisenkot to form a government.
The election itself, though, displayed thoroughly uncomfortable attitudes among Jewish Israelis during the campaign. Politics concentrated substantially on domestic issues, including the demands for accountability over the 7 October Hamas attack, with little attention given to the terrible war waged in Gaza by the Netanyahu-led government and the repeated violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers across the occupied West Bank. It was as if over 80,000 Palestinians killed or missing were best ignored.
Not all Jewish Israelis took this position, but a majority appeared to. This, coupled with Netanyahu’s decades of experience in the Israeli government and his capacity for personal survival, suggested that any sustained political stability based on trust would be difficult to achieve. What remained though, was the transformation among Palestinian Israelis and their determination to vote and put Netanyahu out of office.
The fourth of the elections, the United States mid-sessionals for both houses of congress, was the one that sprung by far the greatest surprise. That the Republicans lost was not unexpected, it was the massive size of the loss that counted.
Given Trump’s past behaviour, if a modest shift in votes had given the Democrats the House but not in the Senate, Trump and his team would have carried on if somewhat tarnished. That was not to be. The extent of the failure was so great that it undermined the entire Trump machine and with it the vast numbers of supportive officials brought on to the Federal payroll in the past two years.
That has three implications. One is at the international level, where Trump will no longer maintain his status and influence. There is a risk of hitting out where he thinks he can, but the extent of the failure in these elections means a minimal risk of Trump trying to cry foul in 2028. Times have changed and it won’t wash.
The second is that the last two years have been hugely profitable for the Trump camp but not just for them. Wealthy elites across the entire country have made millions if not billions and will be singularly unhappy at the great gravy train being derailed. Work will already be underway in the Heritage Foundation, the think tank that authored the Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump administration, and other right-wing think-tanks to adjust to a different era.
Finally, on some key domestic issues with global implications, Trump’s abject failure is very good news. Of all the disastrous policies of the Trump years, it is climate denial and the curbing of the renewables revolution that have been the most dangerous. Within a day of the election result, though, the financial press was reporting a surge in the value of renewable energy outfits, not just in the US but across the world.
Trump is still in the White House and his supporters will still be in the system, but their power is already ebbing away. Taking a global view, the combination of Lula’s re-election in Brazil and Trump’s failure leading to a re-energised environmental movement give the world a rare day of good news.
Article by Paul Rogers republished from openDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
dizzy: The reference to “… 4,000 pro-Palestine supporters have been arrested in recent years.” does not make clear that this is the number of Palestine Action supporters arrested as terrorists for holding protest signs.
Almost 140 arrested at protest against Palestine Action ban outside US embassy in London
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More than 4,000 arrests have been made for supporting Palestine Action since the ban came into effect, Defend Our Juries said, representing the vast majority of terror arrests since last July.
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