Has the political wind changed?

It has been quite a week. First we had “Lula” — Luiz Inácio da Silva (as nobody but his mother ever called him) — defying everybody’s expectations. After winding up two million votes behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election, he made a “miraculous” comeback in the second.

It was like a man going into a revolving door behind you and coming out in front. At the end of the first round, Lula was two million votes behind; at the end of the second round on Oct. 25 he was four million votes ahead. So how did he win a fourth term without cheating?

That’s what Bolsonaro claims he did, having fled to the United States; Trump, Flávio’s mentor, hints at the same. But Lula’s victory was not miraculous. He only learned to read when he was 10, and at 80 he still refused to have a mobile phone. His team finally made him get one and use it.

He wouldn’t do social media videos, so they created a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army, and made him appear on it at least daily. The channel went from zero to 10.8 million viewers in two weeks, and Lula won.

So, Jair Bolsonaro, Flávio’s father, who is serving a long jail sentence after mounting a failed coup attempt in 2025, will stay in jail. Flávio, who hoped to win in his father’s stead, has fled to Florida to avoid charges of money laundering ($680 million from betting companies). And

Brazil, the second-biggest country in the Americas (214 million), is still a democracy.

Hard-right, climate-change-denying, anti-environmental populists still attract a large part of Brazil’s population, and they now rule in many other countries in Latin America. Seven out of eight national elections in the Americas in the past two years saw Trump-backed, right-wing autocrats come to power. But it could be worse.

The Amazon is safe for another four years. (Lula has already reversed much of the damage done by the senior Bolsonaro during his only term in 2019-23.) The Aboriginal Peoples will be protected and Lula’s life’s work, rescuing an entire generation from poverty and ignorance, will continue.

On the same Sunday, Serbia’s authoritarian ruler bit the dust.

Aleksandar Vučić had been president for 12 years, so this time he was running for prime minister, but it was the same authoritarian regime depending on the same populist-nationalist grudges and lies.

Vučić had run into a little trouble with a student movement angry at the pervasive corruption in Serbia, but he was friendly with the Trumps and the Russians so he figured it could all be sorted out with a snap election conducted under the usual conditions. He turned out to be wrong.

The students deliberately had no leaders, no professional politicians and no agenda except “back to democracy and down with corruption,” and, despite a menacing display of regime thugs on the streets the Student List won hands-down. That makes two victories for democracy on the same day.

Then Benjamin Netanyahu lost the Israeli election on Tuesday. The alleged war criminal and Israeli prime minister has ruled the country for all but 11 of the past 30 years, but the second-worst warmonger of our time may be going under.

“Winning an election”, in the Israeli political system, just means the winner gets first go at forming a viable coalition. It could be up to three months before a viable coalition emerges or everybody gives up and agrees that there must be another election.

Making coalitions is especially hard in Israel because Jewish parties normally refuse to let Arab parties play, although 20 per cent of Israel’s citizens are Arabs. Nevertheless, if you count their votes then Netanyahu’s coalition actually lost the election.

“I know how to count,” said Yair Golan of the centre-left Democrats, addressing the Israeli Arabs. “We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes.”

Musician Yali Sobol put it even better in a Facebook post: “If you stop being racist, two amazing things will happen to you. First, you will stop being racist. Second, you will discover you have won.”

Netanyahu is still in power and free to start more wars for at least three months. His wish list is Gaza and the West Bank, Lebanon and Iran (in partnership with Trump) — not necessarily in that order.

But this makes three wins for democracy, because Netanyahu probably will go down in the end — and Donald Trump will lose badly in the U.S. midterm elections on Nov. 3, although he will remain in office.

Maybe it’s just the El Niño, but it feels like a big change could be coming.

» Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers. This column appeared in the Winnipeg Free Press.