Why elections in Brazil and Serbia matter to the global political order

Brazil's Flavio Bolsonaro of the Liberal Party (PL) gestures during a campaign rally in Santa Barbara d'Oeste, state of Sao Paulo, Brazil on October 3, 2026. [AFP]

Two countries of different sizes held elections on Sunday, with outcomes that reverberated across the world because of an intensifying contest between two forces that use World War II as a mental demarcation line.

First, in reaction to the horrors of war, there was an effort to reject racism and imperialism by embracing the universality of the rule of law and human equality as the best guarantees of world peace and prosperity.

Second, the emergence of the New Right Movement threatens to reverse this progress by glorifying pre-World War II discriminatory ‘nationalisms’ and racism. The election outcomes in the two countries, for different reasons, thus represent a check on the New Right.

Serbia, a tiny Eastern European country of barely seven million people, attracts more attention than its size would warrant. Anti-Austrian Serbians were partly responsible for the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, later known as World War I, which ended the Austro-Hungarian Empire and ushered in the Soviet Union. Grouped with other small states in 1918 as part of the newly created Yugoslavia, Serbia re-emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Its leaders, among them Aleksander Vucic, a member of the New Right Movement, remained unresponsive to Serbian needs, provoking the youthful Gen Z movement in 2024. By proposing a Student List of acceptable candidates, the movement won the October 25, 2026, parliamentary elections. Having learnt from past electoral fraud in Serbia, the Gen Z activists took steps to record and publicise malpractices such as “chain voting” as a way of safeguarding the vote. Kenyan Gen Z activists, like their Serbian counterparts, had also emerged in 2024 to oppose bad and insensitive policies and took note of the Serbian students’ political success in 2026.

While Vucic accepted defeat and blamed the American ‘deep state’ and anti-Donald Trump forces, the response in Brazil, where another Trump ally, Flavio Bolsonaro, lost to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, was different.

Brazil is a large former Portuguese colony in South America with slightly more than 200 million inhabitants of mixed origins: roughly 45 per cent white, 42 per cent mixed-race and nine per cent black or descendants of former slaves. Its 2026 election attracted global interest partly because it was a contest between Trump’s New Right Movement and the 21st Century Socialist Movement, personified by Lula. Twenty-first-century socialism was an ideological hybrid that sought to reconcile elements of capitalism and socialism. In re-electing Lula for a fourth time, Brazilians defied Trump and his allies. Initially, Bolsonaro refused to accept the results, despite his Liberal Party conceding defeat, and then fled to the United States, claiming that he had not lost but that “the system won”.

Lula, an industrial worker from Sao Paulo, represents a blend of the ideas of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, two men whose revolutionary thinking influenced global political behaviour over the past 200 years. Marx had advised ‘proletarians’, or industrial workers, to rise up and break free from the chains imposed by capitalist masters. Lenin, adapting Marx’s ideas to the Russian situation, took advantage of the instability caused by the Great War to bypass Marx’s historical sequence and move towards revolution. In 1917, he launched the Bolshevik Revolution, whose success made him an idol to other potential political system changers, including China’s Mao Zedong, Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta. What Kenyatta admired in Lenin was his ability to read the political moment, not his ‘socialism’. Lula’s Leninism lay in his ability to adapt Marxist-Leninist ideals to the realities of Brazil.

In the post-Cold War period of the 1990s, Lula was among a new generation of Latin American leaders, including Argentina’s Nestor Kirchner, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, who embraced the philosophy of ‘Socialism of the 21st Century’. They sought to balance capitalist and geopolitical realities with the ideal of catering to the needs of their countries. In effect, they sought ways of making capitalism work for the people.

In a June 2002 ‘Letter to the Brazilian People’, Lula wrote about fighting hunger, poverty and homelessness while assuring financial critics that there would be no debt defaults. His approach was similar to Kenyatta’s 1963 encounter with white settlers in Nakuru, whose purpose was to ensure that the settlers would not be tempted to create chaos. Thus, Lula, elected president in October 2002, avoided economic disruptions as he transformed Brazil into a regional and global powerhouse. He became so popular that US President Barack Obama declared him “the most popular politician on earth” in 2009. By the time he left office in 2010, his approval rating was almost 90 per cent.

Balancing capitalist pressures with socialist objectives required political skills that Lula had acquired as a labour union official and founder of the Workers’ Party, or PT, for which he spent one month in jail in 1980.

“The PT,” he said in August 1980, “is a very practical thing .... We are in need of an instrument, a tool, to open space for political participation of the worker. And the PT is that!”

He picked businessman Jose Alencar as his running mate in 2002, and they were elected. Lula was re-elected in 2006 with a comfortable margin.

As president, Lula concentrated on maintaining a balance while undertaking domestic and foreign policy reforms that spurred economic growth and enhanced Brazil’s standing and global influence. Within Brazil, he aimed to eliminate hunger through Projecto Fome Zero and introduced Bolsa Familia, a family support programme that subsidised parents to vaccinate their children and ensure they attended school. The government also supported food production for school feeding programmes.

These measures helped reduce poverty, improve the health of Brazilian children, reduce child labour and domestic abuse, cut school absenteeism and lift more than 40 million Brazilians out of extreme poverty.

At the international level, Lula sought to assert Brazil’s freedom to determine and pursue its own interests, challenging the notion that it was another country’s ‘backyard’. He sought to realign Brazil with developing countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East without directly antagonising the United States. He remains one of the leaders associated with the original four countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — that met in Russia in 2009 to strengthen BRIC as a global geopolitical force.

Although Lula left the presidency in 2010 as a highly popular leader, his ideological opponents, including Senator Jair Bolsonaro, went on to mount what the author describes as a ‘coup’ by impeaching Dilma Rousseff. It later emerged that they had also conspired against Lula’s political freedom.

With Lula jailed in 2017, Bolsonaro was elected in 2018, styling himself as Brazil’s Donald Trump. He proceeded to dismantle Lula’s policies, including poverty eradication programmes such as Bolsa Familia, as well as his foreign policy orientation.

The annulment of Lula’s conviction in March 2021 cleared the way for a 2022 confrontation between Lula and Bolsonaro, which Lula won. Bolsonaro subsequently tried to emulate Trump by rejecting the official election results and encouraging insurrection in January 2023. Convicted of attempting to overthrow the government, Bolsonaro was jailed and therefore could not be a candidate in 2026.

His son, Flavio, replaced him as the anti-Lula candidate in 2026, despite suspicions surrounding his business dealings. Since opinion polls suggested that Lula was not as popular as he had been during his first two terms, he was expected to lose to Flavio. That did not happen because Lula mobilised voters who had previously stayed at home to turn out in large numbers.

His remarkable comeback indicated a possible reversal of the Trump-like New Right tide, or “Americanisation”, and displeased Trump.

The elections in Serbia and Brazil were statements that voters were unwilling to let the New Right destroy institutions in the name of xenophobic nationalism. Reading Brazilian public sentiment correctly, Lula designed ways of delivering on his 21st Century Socialist agenda. As a leader in the Global South, Lula’s 2026 victory was received positively across the world.

Leninist to the core and subscribing to Lenin’s Commanding Heights theory, Lula readily adjusts to prevailing realities while remaining focused on his goals. And he won.