The good #1:
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the Brazilian president, has staged a dramatic election fightback, defeating his far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, to claim a historic fourth term in power.
With nearly 99% of votes counted the 80-year-old leftist received 51.75% of the vote to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.25%.
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
the count, and at the hotel where he was watching the count.
As the result was confirmed, Reginaldo Lopes, a key Lula ally, told the Guardian: “I feel incredible … This is Brazil
telling the world that the extreme right is fascist, that the extreme
right is against black people, is against the poor, against the state,
against gay people ... We are going to reorganize the democratic forces
[in this country].”...
The good #2:
The long-serving leader of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, has conceded defeat, ushering in a seismic political shift after a historic election that saw the increasingly authoritarian leader pitted against a student-led movement that had spent two years protesting against his government.
Vučić pointed to preliminary results that suggested voters had overwhelmingly backed the students, potentially giving them a majority in the country’s 250-seat parliament.
“We still do not have final results,” Vučić told supporters at his party headquarters in Belgrade. “On the basis of a sample … it is clear that we have lost these elections, the Student List has won, they will have between 135 and 140 seats and we will have 105.”
A representative sample by the CESID-IPSPS pollsters suggested that the Student List’s candidate list will have 138 deputies, while Vučić’s rightwing Serbian Progressive party (SNS) garnered 104 seats. The remaining seats were likely to be shared between ethnic national minority parties, said the pollsters.
As news broke that Vučić’s 12 years in power had come to an end, celebrations erupted on the streets of Belgrade and other cities. [snip]
As people waited for the election results to come in, speculation had begun to swirl online about whether Vučić would seek to hold on to power regardless. His swift admission of defeat, however, was reminiscent of his ally, Viktor Orbán, in neighbouring Hungary six months ago, fuelling hopes of a democratic resurgence to central Europe...
Two important victories for democratic movements over right-wing authoritarianism. Next are elections in Israel tomorrow, then our mid-terms. Keep the momentum going!
The bad:
US forces in the Middle East are prepared to launch new, potentially major, military operations against Iran "within 96 hours of receiving" an order from President Donald Trump, according to two US officials.
Sufficient
forces are now deployed in the region to carry out the potential
attacks, the sources said. The scope of new US military operations would
likely go beyond efforts to simply "mow the lawn" or maintain the
status quo by striking radars, launchers and other Iranian assets that
can be quickly reconstituted — as has been the case since Trump halted
full combat operations earlier this year, the sources added.
"It
will be a big effort," one of the officials told CNN. That view has
been echoed by other current and former US officials familiar with
internal military planning discussions — some of whom say it is a
question of when, not if, Trump will issue a go-order. They believe it
could come any time before the end of the year, though most likely after
the US midterm elections.
Iranian forces are now
more familiar with US tactics, and it would therefore be harder for the
American military to effectively destroy all potential intended targets.
However, leaders in US Central Command and the Pentagon have been
developing a wide-ranging target list, which includes Iranian energy
infrastructure, military sites and nuclear facilities.
Officials
say that Trump has not made up his mind on what he will do after the
midterms but that he appears to be leaning toward ordering major action.
But officials also caution that Trump has appeared in the past to lean
toward certain actions only to back off at the last moment...
TACO keeps telegraphing a major escalation in his war of choice with Iran, a war that he keeps insisting we won after Iran was obliterated. He wants something "big" to distract from his upcoming mid-terms defeat. The period between the election and when a new Congress is seated on January 3 is bound to be one of the most dangerous times in our history.
The ugly:
President Donald Trump intensified his anti-Muslim rhetoric against
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Sunday, portraying him as a
threat to national security and questioning his loyalty to the United
States in remarks that drew a sharp rebuke from a former top Arab
American ally.
Trump called El-Sayed, a former Detroit health official, a "jihadist"
who was "on the side of the terrorists" and would "have to go through a
metal detector before he's allowed to go into the Senate." He also
repeatedly invoked the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, drawing a
comparison between stopping El-Sayed from entering the Senate chamber
and the passengers who fought back against the hijackers aboard United
Flight 93.
El-Sayed, who would become the nation's first Muslim senator if
elected, has called attacks on his loyalty to the country "shameful" and
repeatedly denied any ties to extremist groups. The Republican
president's remarks were condemned by Bishara Bahbah, a founder of Arab
Americans for Trump, the group that helped lead the president's outreach
to Arab American voters in 2024.
"The president's statements are out of line," he said in a phone interview. "They are crossing a red line. They are racist."
With Republicans on the defensive over inflation, soaring fuel prices
and the Iran war, the president has been trying to generate turnout by
claiming that El-Sayed and other Democrats are existential threats to
America, instead of electoral rivals. Michigan's Senate race between
El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers is among a handful of contests that
could determine control of the chamber...
The Scoundrel-in-Chief, to whom no slur is off limits, has firmly established himself as a racist, a bigot, and a white nationalist. His desperation to save the Senate (and most importantly to him, himself) is leading to him campaign in swing states and red states alike, where the dotard is just as likely to comment on a man's ass as he is to smear Americans whose religion or race or ethnicity he doesn't like. He's not a president of all the American people and never was; he's a moron MAGAt white nationalist cult leader and rabble-rouser. How far we've fallen.
