Chances are you woke this morning to news of two momentous election results. In Serbia, a student-led movement has ousted the country’s long-serving leader, Aleksandar Vučić (which you can read more about here). And just hours ago, Brazil’s president staged a sensational turnaround against his far-right opponent after a nail-biting vote.
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, known as Lula, won a forth nonconsecutive term as president, seeing off far-right senator Flávio Bolsonaro, who spearheaded the radical populist movement built by his father and former president, Jair. Jair Bolsonaro is serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup after he lost the 2022 election. After Bolsonaro’s surprise first-round victory earlier this month, the Workers’ party incumbent Lula pulled off a historic fightback – a consolidation of the democratic resurgence the country has enjoyed since he took office – and an early birthday present for the veteran leftist, who turns 81 on Tuesday.
But with Bolsonaro refusing to accept the result, the victory is a tense one. I spoke to the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent Tom Phillips, who was in São Paulo at the Workers’ party vote count, to find out what the result means and what may lie ahead. UK news | Two people have been killed and more than 160,000 properties have been left without power as Storm Boelo continues to batter the UK.
Crime | British police are recording a growing number of crimes linked to cocaine, including assaults, domestic abuse and dangerous driving, as figures show consumption has surged across England. France | Hundreds of thousands marched in cities across France on Saturday in largely peaceful protests to support schoolchildren’s demands for more teachers and repairs to dilapidated buildings, as Emmanuel Macron faces a social and political crisis in his final months as president. UK politics | Prime minister Andy Burnham’s call for the UK to consider a return to free movement with Europe has been backed by senior cabinet ministers including Angela Rayner but risks causing concern among fellow red wall MPs.
Aviation | Three in four European airline pilots have taken microsleeps in the cockpit, while almost a quarter routinely fly despite being too fatigued to work, according to a report. When the results were declared just after midnight UK time, the choice of Brazil’s 159 million voters was narrow, but clear. The 80-year-old leftist received 51.79% of the vote to his rival’s 48.21% – about 4.3m votes – in what Lula called “a defeat for denialism”.
A visibly angry Bolsonaro has already refused to concede, citing a decision to extend voting for an extra two hours – although both sides had called for it, for different reasons. The outcome was an unprecedented turnaround after a populist surge in first-round voting at the beginning of the month left Brazil’s progressives reeling. In those early October elections, Flávio Bolsonaro received 56.1m votes to Lula’s 53.8m – 47.03% to 45.16% – putting the 45-year-old scion of the authoritarian clan in pole position: not once, since the return of democracy to Brazil in 1985, has the first-round runner-up managed to turn the game around and win the second ballot.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
