Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a vocal critic Donald Trump, was reelected Sunday in a result that provides relief to critics of widening U.S. influence in Latin America.
With 100% of the vote counted, Brazil’s electoral court announced that the soon to be 81-year-old Lula had a lead of nearly 4.4 million votes over opponent Flávio Bolsonaro, giving him 51.8% of the total vote. Bolsonaro quickly refused to concede defeat and asked for the election results to be annulled after an evening of chaos at some polling places that followed a last-minute decision to extend voting by two hours.
Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Lula defeated to take the presidency in 2022.
Lula’s triumph bucks a regional trend of victories for right-of-center presidential candidates allied with Trump. It also means Latin America’s largest economy, with a GDP of $2.6 trillion per year, will likely continue defying Trump’s demands, despite the pressure of increased tariffs.
Oddly enough, some are more so than others. Take Orban for example. While not shy of all sorts of shady means to bend the election to his will, when all of that did not suffice anymore, he simply conceded defeat. Also the Serbian autocrat Vucic appears to accept defeat. Maybe he is afraid of facing the fate of other autocrats in case he is trying to overthrow anything.
It takes special liberal gymnastics to leap over 80% of the dictatorships America is directly arming to land on these half-baked examples.
I have no idea what you are talking about, above poster was posting about fascists always being sore losers. Those are just two relevant examples from Europe that occurred very recently. They are not representative but they do prove a point that fascists are sometimes much less entrenched in power than they want to make everyone believed to be. Also Vucic was hardly “America’s” man, he played the US and Russia both at the same time.