Peak election season has started well for the forces of democracy with three wins, although the third is complicated.
Serbia
First was Serbia, which I hadn’t got around to previewing but which went to the polls last Sunday. (The Guardian’s Julian Borger included it in his list of crucial elections.) Since 2014 the country has been led by Alexander Vučić, first as prime minister then as president; this year, prevented by term limits from running again for the presidency, he was attempting to return as prime minister.
As is all too common (especially in eastern Europe), Vučić started out as a democratic leader and has become increasingly authoritarian. That verdict should be balanced – as most of this week’s reports have not been – with an acknowledgement of the difficulty of his position; Serbia is a hard country to govern, with the competing pressures of a virulent nationalist lobby, a historic alliance with Russia and a widespread desire to join the European Union.
But there is no doubt that Vučić had stayed too long and it was time for a change. And Serbian voters have delivered just that. The traditional opposition parties had withdrawn to leave the field clear for the Student List, which originated in the anti-corruption protests set off by the Novi Sad station disaster of 2024. It won 53.5% of the vote and 140 of the 250 seats, about 600,000 votes ahead of Vučić’s United Serbia, with 39.6% and 104 seats.
The remaining six seats will go to representatives of ethnic minorities (two each Hungarian, Albanian and Bosniak). Vučić conceded defeat on the basis of the exit polls, without even waiting for real figures. Responses from the EU were very positive, although it remains to be seen whether it will do anything to end its foot-dragging on the admission of Serbia and its neighbors.
Brazil
Brazil was the big one: as readers will no doubt be aware, the miracle that I called for in my preview really did happen. Centre-left president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was re-elected for a fourth (and second consecutive) term, beating the far right’s Flávio Bolsonaro 51.8% to 48.2%, a margin of a little under four and a half million votes, or about double what he managed in 2022.
For much of the count it looked fiendishly close, but Lula won drawing away. By the recent standards of Latin America it was a pretty solid margin. Turnout was 80.8%, up slightly on both the first round (78.9%) and on 2022 (79.4%), but not enough to account for the reversal of fortunes. Clearly a number of voters changed their minds in the last three weeks, prompted perhaps by Lula’s strong performance in the televised debates.
Bolsonaro has not conceded defeat but has instead decamped to the United States, shortly after a judge investigating money laundering charges ordered him to surrender his passport. Given the politicisation (under both sides) of the justice system in Brazil that was not an entirely unreasonable move; it remains to be seen whether Donald Trump will try to use him to make trouble or whether his natural attraction to winners will lead him to mend fences with Lula.
Israel
After two clear results, one that – to no-one’s surprise – is rather more complex. Israel went to the polls last night (see my preview here) in an election widely expected to end the tenure of far-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s not yet certain that it has done that, but the voters have done their best: if he does manage to hang on, it will be because his opponents, once again, fail to agree about replacing him.
Counting is still continuing, but the general shape of the result is clear (official results can be followed here; Votes26 gives projections and exit polls). Netanyahu’s far-right coalition has dropped to around 42% of the vote, which will give it maybe 52 of the 120 seats, down from 64 last time.* His Likud party, with probably 27 seats, will however remain the largest single party, giving it some claim on the first attempt to form a government (although the president is entitled to call on whoever seems best placed).
Arrayed against him are the Zionist opposition parties, with around 38% and something like 50 seats, and the two Arab or non-Zionist parties, who have outperformed their polls with about 14% and 18 seats. If they would all work together, as no doubt they would in a normal democracy, Netanyahu’s fate would be sealed. But their differences give him an opportunity, albeit a slight one.
Likud has done slightly better than the polls suggested (although some of that has come at the expense of its coalition partners), making this look not unlike the 2021 election, which yielded a short-lived non-Netanyahu government. My sense is that the opposition is somewhat better placed this time, but we’ll need to see how the final figures look before saying too much about that.
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* Netanyahu’s starting point should arguably be 68 seats, since the four members of New Hope who were elected on an opposition ticket in 2022 are now in the Likud camp.
