© Kara Birnbaum / NBC News
In Serbia and Hungary, groundswells of youthful energy topple entrenched governments
The first tanker carrying Russian diesel to the United States since 2022 is expected to arrive in New York within the next few weeks, but its 40,000-ton cargo amounts to less than two hours of American consumption. The shipment will barely register at the pump—and it answers the wrong question, since what drove American diesel past $6 a gallon was never a shortage of Russian supply, but historic bottlenecks from the war in the Middle East.
Recall what happened between May and July of this year, when Ukraine launched one of the most destructive phases of its energy war against Moscow, sending waves of drones attacking massive Russian refineries at Kirishi, Ryazan, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, and Omsk one after another. If Russian refining capacity governed American fuel costs, prices at U.S. truck stops should have exploded. Instead, American diesel fell by $1.06 a gallon.
With the midterms days away and September’s consumer price index showing fuel oil up a staggering 74% on the year, President Donald Trump has cast Kyiv as the architect of American inflation. “What’s happened in Russia with Ukraine has been really the biggest problem for diesel,” he said in the Oval Office on September 30 before naming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the culprit, telling reporters that Zelenskyy “wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel.”
The charge is politically convenient but economically backward. Until this month’s waiver, Russian fuel had been barred from American ports since 2022, meaning Ukrainian strikes have reached U.S. pumps only through the gradual tightening of global supply. The real shockwave runs through the Strait of Hormuz, where Tehran can choke off a fifth of the world’s seaborne crude overnight. Diesel was $3.48 a gallon in January and still under $4 the week American and Israeli bombs fell on Iran. When Tehran closed the Strait, the price jumped 96 cents in a single week.
From that moment, the U.S. price line has moved in lockstep with the Iran war—cresting at the April ceasefire, dipping only after the June truce, climbing after the pause in hostilities collapsed in July. By September, the tanker war had driven diesel to a record $6.53.
Ukraine’s unceasing drone campaign has at most modestly nudged up the global floor, while the Iran war has steered every spike and plunge.
By authorizing the sale of Russian diesel, Washington provided Moscow the relief that sanctions are meant to withhold. And when Zelenskyy refused to halt strikes on Russian refineries, Americans throttled the Starlink defenses only they can supply.
Now, Ukraine and its European backers are left with a narrowing set of options. Pulled with discipline, however, the levers they hold can still keep Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on a tightening clock.
After an Oct. 9 phone call with Putin, President Trump directed the Treasury to reopen American ports to Russian diesel through April 2027. On paper, the deal promises 4.8 million tons of fuel. In reality, the promise amounts to roughly 10 days of U.S. demand, and analysts doubt that Moscow can ship even that much after months of Ukrainian strikes on the refineries that would fill the tankers.
Carnegie’s Sergey Vakulenko calls the arrangement “largely for show,” yet for a Kremlin watching its September oil and gas tax revenues plunge 22% year-over-year, the spectacle is the prize. What former U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul condemned as “absolutely deplorable,” and Zelenskyy called “a gift to Putin,” was followed a week later by a concession of far greater strategic weight. Two days before the Russia provisions of the Graham sanctions act were scheduled to bite, an executive order waived them. In a single stroke, the White House neutralized both the 100 and 500% tariffs and stripped out the clause locking existing sanctions in place.
While Moscow collected waivers, Kyiv got the vise. Washington announced an “energy ceasefire” the Kremlin never bothered to acknowledge. After Zelenskyy held his fire for three days, Russia pounded Ukrainian energy infrastructure 76 times in the week that followed. By the Ukrainian president’s account—one Secretary of State Marco Rubio denies—the American satellite alerts that warn Ukraine when a Russian missile is in the air went dark for a period of time. Procurement contracts required for the transfer of an allied-funded batch of Patriot interceptors reportedly sat unsigned on the desk of U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth.
Meanwhile, the speed of Starshield datalinks, the military-grade Starlink network that Ukraine’s drone units rely on, was throttled. Starshield datalinks need to operate at speeds up to 550 km/h (342 mph) to effectively intercept Russian jet-powered Shahed and Geran drones.
The 160 km/h (100 mph) cap was apparently instituted—simply insufficient to protect Ukrainian civilians from Russian ballistic missiles.
Trump and Elon Musk finger-pointed at each other for the restriction. Trump has reportedly since called Musk to lift the cap. U.S. officials say service is running more normally. Kyiv says the limit remained in place into this weekend, with President Zelenskyy tweeting on October 24 that service has now been restored.
The Trump Administration should also allow Ukraine to use the system in Russia, targeting ballistic missile launchers. Take out the archer, not the arrows.
Washington’s squeeze rests on the premise that Kyiv is losing and must be forced to settle, but the front-line situation does not support that notion. Russian forces have made virtually no net territorial gains in 2026 despite suffering more than 40,000 casualties a month since July. At this year’s rate of advance, we estimate that Moscow would need 60 years to capture the rest of Donetsk Oblast.
In fact, the momentum has tilted the other way, with Ukrainian counteroffensives, such as the exceptionally innovative Operation Vivaldi. For months, Kyiv’s forces have killed or seriously wounded more Russian soldiers than the Kremlin can recruit. Closing that gap would require a mass mobilization Putin has been afraid to order, wary of unrest in a country reeling from the fuel shortages created by Ukraine’s refinery strikes. The myth of an inevitable Russian victory amounts to a Kremlin sales pitch aimed at Washington, and the very energy campaign the White House wants to shut down is what keeps Putin boxed in.
Nor can the White House physically switch that campaign off. For all the damage the administration’s freeze inflicted on Ukraine’s air shield, enough Ukrainian drones and missiles were able to reach their targets. Washington’s leverage is entirely defensive, whereas Ukraine’s offensive reach is built at home and in Europe. The 1,000-strong armada that struck St. Petersburg in mid-October was built around FP-1 drones, 90% of which are Ukrainian-made, flying into Russian airspace where Starlink does not function, and Starshield caps do not apply. The E.U.’s Kaja Kallas has rightly defended Ukraine’s actions as legitimate self-defense.
By Putin’s estimate, the wider Ukrainian campaign has cost Russia about 1% of GDP, more than a year of Russian growth, as the central bank’s fight against punishing inflation pushed interest rates to their highest level since the early 2000s. The true toll is almost certainly worse. As we have previously argued, even after Moscow blacked out mandatory economic data, the IMF continues to recycle unverified Kremlin figures to dub Russia the world’s fourth-largest economy at peak output, despite ranking just 51st in GDP per capita.
In 2022, hundreds of billions of dollars abandoned the Russian economy after our team helped spur the withdrawal of more than 1,000 major corporations following the invasion. Firms that curtailed operations outperformed those that did not, in terms of market performance.
Even where Kyiv chooses to look beyond oil, its domestic weapons require no American permission and offend no American farmer. Homegrown Long Neptune missiles have already crippled four of the Black Sea Fleet’s Kalibr missile carriers and recently destroyed four Russian Su-34 bombers, proving that Ukraine can systematically hunt the launchers, airfields, and factories that fire on its cities. The same freedom of action applies to striking Russian data centers, an asymmetric campaign that an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute judges lopsidedly in Kyiv’s favor because Ukraine’s critical data is already safely hosted abroad.
Holding an offensive campaign that Washington wants to stop but cannot physically block changes the terms of diplomacy. Toward the White House, Kyiv should act as a customer rather than a supplicant. Any pause in energy strikes should be treated strictly as an opportunity to make a deal—offered only in exchange for verified Russian reciprocity and binding, written guarantees from Washington on Patriot interceptors, satellite-based missile launch warnings, and uncapped Starshield access, a bargain of the kind legislators like Senator Roger Wicker and organizations like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies have urged.
Kyiv’s balancing act rests on a hard truth in Brussels. Europe can replace most of America’s financial support and much of its weaponry within two years, but it cannot replace Patriot-class interceptors, space-based ballistic-missile warning, or Starlink-scale connectivity this winter. The vulnerability is partly of Europe’s own making after three decades of over-reliance on American dominance, and it now collides with an American arsenal running dry.
The on-again, off-again war with Iran that drove U.S. diesel to $6.53 is also the conflict that emptied the Pentagon’s magazines. According to an analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Gulf conflict consumed roughly two-thirds of America’s Patriot inventory and more than a third of its THAAD interceptors, leaving a rebuild measured in years at the exact moment Ukraine’s Patriot stockpiles are reportedly exhausted. Europe’s scramble to build sovereign air defenses—four SAMP/T NG batteries currently on order, a 10-nation FREYJA program aiming for a first intercept in mid-2027, and the diplomatic courtship of Japan, the sole non-American producer of PAC-3 interceptors—is real and necessary, but slow. Every euro spent on European interceptors is one less dollar earned in Washington, and one fewer armament President Trump can delay.
A similar bottleneck applies to space. While Europe’s radar and optical satellites could potentially replace American targeting imagery within weeks, OneWeb and the E.U.’s GovSatcom offer only a partial hedge against a Starlink slowdown. And a European satellite constellation capable of warning of a ballistic launch probably will not exist before the 2030s.
Because Europe cannot buy its way out of those technical bottlenecks overnight, it must lean aggressively into the financial and maritime levers it controls today. The E.U.’s €90 billion loan covers 2026 and much of 2027, and when the remaining €70 billion gap comes to a head at the December European Council, moving the €202 billion in frozen Russian assets out of Belgium offers the clearest route around Belgium’s objections. Better still, a full ban on shipping services for Russian crude, along with expanding the shadow-fleet boardings that European navies have already begun, could squeeze Moscow’s war chest at almost no cost to European taxpayers.
Ukraine’s most decisive advantage, though, is found on the factory floor. Domestic drone production has surged 370% this year, and the Ukrainian-made Flamingo cruise missile costs just under $600,000, less than a fifth of an American Tomahawk’s $3.5 million price tag. By guaranteeing a loan to the Flamingo’s manufacturer, Denmark has laid out a blueprint for surviving an erratic Washington: European capital behind Ukrainian weapons.
A bitter paradox governs the current battlefield. The offensive campaign squeezing Moscow is the one Washington objects to, while the defenses faltering over Ukrainian cities are the ones only the U.S. can supply. By blaming Kyiv for an energy shock originating in the Persian Gulf, the White House has struck a bargain that lowers no prices at home, replenishes the aggressor’s coffers abroad, and teaches the Kremlin that American sanctions expire if Putin simply waits them out. Such a posture delivers neither peace nor strength.
Ukraine is akin to the Biblical hero David, who, through cunning, triumphed over the lumbering giant Goliath. Moscow's “card hand” is neither the colossus Trump believes it to be nor the colossus its propaganda advertises. Russia is not remotely an economic superpower. Beneath its vast map lies a concentrated population—over 80% of the population lives in the 20% not plagued by extreme cold, permafrost, and poor soil—and a brittle economy dependent on raw materials the world can increasingly buy elsewhere, backed by a military with a long history of failing to subdue smaller, more determined foes, from Japan in 1905 and Poland in 1920 to Finland in 1940 and the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s. Sheer land mass has never guaranteed victory when the smaller side is fighting for its existence.
The silver lining is that Washington’s attempted coercion is forging the European autonomy it assumed would never materialize. If European leaders withstand Russian pressure over the next 18 months and resist the political disarray stoked by Kremlin disinformation, the continent will emerge a far more formidable power—proving the quip circulating in allied capitals that Europe has found no better unifier since Charlemagne than Donald Trump. Europe, Ukraine, and the world now know what an American guarantee is worth when the guarantor changes its mind, and Washington is about to learn that leverage, like interceptors, is a stock that depletes with every use.
As Mark Twain advised, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
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Judge Jesse M. Furman said Comey, who was an assistant U.S. attorney for a decade, was illegally fired in July 2025 despite her work on some of the nation's highest-profile cases and consistently receiving "the highest accolades from supervisors and peers alike."
© Amanda Perobelli/Reuters
The next time someone does you a favor, take a minute to note how they respond to “thank you.” You’ll likely find that the traditional “you’re welcome” is fast fading and being replaced by “no problem” or “no worries.”
We often treat politeness as a set of rules that people either follow or ignore. But the rules themselves are changing.
In the time of Old English (5th to 11th centuries), acting according to one’s rank and station was simply expected. Linguistic analysis shows very direct request forms, for example, “Thou shalt do X,” rather than the more modern, “Would you mind doing X?” And routine thanking, or saying “you’re welcome,” would have seemed odd in a time when people simply did what was required.
When Norman French started to enter English around 1066, the idea of courteous behavior also entered the language. An example would be the move toward switching between “you” and “thou” to appropriately show respect or intimacy, modeled on the French tu/vous distinction.
This concept of courtesy was central to how one expressed gratitude and, by the time we arrived in the early modern era (the time of Shakespeare), thanking was firmly established. However, routinely responding to those thanks was not common. If uttered at all, we’d more often hear something like a deferential, “I am but your humble servant.”
In the 18th century, elaborate complimenting routines became popular, and by the late 19th and early 20th century, English-speaking society had a greater focus on treating all people as equals. As a result, being aware of how one’s actions might impose upon others became increasingly important.
Requests that were once directly stated as imperatives were now couched with indirectness as merely suggestions or questions: “Shut the window,” became “Could you please shut the window?” And, in addition to saying “thanks,” responding with an acknowledgment of that thanks, such as “you’re welcome,” became routine.
This brings us to modern times. Today, “you’re welcome” is becoming less common. Instead, when someone says “thank you,” we reply with “not at all,” “no problem,” or “no worries.” This assures the person who expresses gratitude that no imposition was involved. In this way, we attempt to offset any social imbalance.
As a result, Americans who say “no problem” and those who always respond with “you’re welcome” can tend to believe the other camp sounds rude.
Those who prefer “no problem” often feel that “you’re welcome” has a condescending tone, while “you’re welcome” traditionalists feel like “no problem” suggests the favor could have been a problem. For instance, the sense that “you’re welcome” can have a bit of a smug, haughty tone has been played up by comedians like Will Ferrell in his 2009 Broadway show, You’re Welcome America, satirizing George W. Bush’s presidency.
Research confirms this shift toward expressions like “no problem” or “no worries” over “you’re welcome” is a generational one. In the norms of how we respond to thank you across generations, linguist Aaron Dinkin found that young Americans increasingly preferred “no problem” as the go-to polite response to “thank you.” Older speakers still felt “you’re welcome” was more appropriate, particularly when a favor required more than perfunctory gratitude.
So, the way someone responds to “thank you” is much more than a simple return on someone’s gratitude. These small words help us understand how politeness—and our expectations of one another—have changed over time.
If there is a Democratic wave in next week’s midterm elections, one of the biggest reasons for that will be young voters.
While voters of all ages have soured on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party since his 2024 victory, polls show that the decline has been particularly pronounced among the young people who’d backed him in surprising numbers just two years ago. That election result prompted endless conversation about a “vibe shift” among Gen Z, and whether younger voters had turned against “woke” progressives, become radicalized by “manosphere” podcasts and TikTok algorithms, or lashed out against Biden-era gerontocracy.
But the story looks very different heading into November. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found that, of people aged 19–34 who voted for Trump over Kamala Harris, only 49 percent approve of his job performance as president. (In contrast, among Trump 2024 voters aged 50 and above, about 75 percent still approve of him.)
Pew also found earlier this year that partisan identification among young adults has shifted — or, rather, reverted.
In 2022 and 2023, Democrats had a 17-point advantage among adults aged 18–29 — 55 percent of them said they were Democrats or leaned toward Democrats, while just 38 percent said they were Republican or leaned toward the GOP.
In 2024, that gap closed, and Republicans actually took a slight edge, 47 percent to Democrats’ 46 percent. But now, in 2026, Democrats are back to a 16-point advantage, getting 54 percent of young voters compared to the GOP’s 38 percent.
And it isn’t just that fewer young people are saying they’re Republican. Those who remain Republican are also saying they’re less likely to vote this year.
According to the Harvard Youth Poll released last week, 50 percent of Democrats aged 18–29 say they’ll definitely vote, but only 34 percent of Republicans in that age range say the same. That’s a 16-point partisan gap; the biggest this poll found in recent midterm cycles.
The core reasons for all this in a sense aren’t too surprising. Like older voters, young voters say they’re most concerned about issues like the cost of living, corruption in government, overseas wars, and the cost of health care.
But the swings — and the feelings of betrayal and disappointment among prior Trump supporters — have been particularly dramatic among the young, which raises the question of what about their experience and outlook is influencing their politics in particular.
To answer that, I spoke to advocates and political consultants focused on young voters. Here’s what they see as the origins — and limits — of the coming youthquake.
Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Gen Z-focused strategy firm The Up and Up, told me that we should think about young people who voted for Trump in 2024 as really three separate cohorts.
First, she said, are the “hardcore MAGA young people who still stand by the president, just like the older MAGA folks.” They supported him in 2024, and they still do.
Second, she said, are the young people who “are very much on the America First train” but who “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment, whether it comes to building a White House ballroom, or the Epstein files, or starting new wars” — and have moved away from him as a result.
These young people are much less likely to move toward Democrats, but many of them could be disillusioned and not bother to vote this year.
Third, she said, is “a large cohort of young people, predominantly young men, who were never hardcore MAGA, but who voted for Trump in 2024 because they were frustrated by the political conversation at large.”
“They were frustrated by their economic situation; they were tired of political correctness and the pendulum swinging too far in the direction of ‘wokeness,’” Janfaza continued. These people, she said, now feel “politically homeless.”
Tina Tang of the Democratic-aligned firm Navigator Research has conducted many focus groups interviewing young people who now regret voting for Trump. She told me that many of those “Trump regretters” said they’d initially hoped he would bring change to the political system generally, and that he’d deliver on his promises about the economy and jobs.
“Young voters are especially worried about jobs right now,” Tang said. “That was actually one of the biggest frustrations we heard from young voters this time around: frustration with the job market. We hear a lot about how he promised a lot of things; he promised the economy was going to get better, that costs were going to come down, that there would be more jobs.”
Several of those I interviewed also urged caution about the common trope that young people tend to be strongly progressive or liberal, a longtime assumption that led many observers to be caught off guard by their swing toward Republicans in 2024.
Indeed, the Harvard Youth poll released this week found that 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought of themselves as liberal, 23 percent as conservative, and about 46 percent as something in between.
Santiago Mayer, founder of the progressive youth-focused group Voters of Tomorrow, told me that while Gen Z voters often have liberal values and policy views, they often didn’t define politics in ideological terms: “I think for a lot of things many of us would consider progressive, for them, they are common sense, and they’re not necessarily analyzing these issues through a political lens.”
Indeed, Mayer said that while the politicians who are most appealing to young voters can vary in ideology, “the one thing they have in common is that they are very pragmatic and very practical. They are talking about how they’re going to improve things today and how they’re actually going to create material, tangible change in young people’s lives.”
Tang of Navigator Research concurred, telling me that young people are “absolutely still very skeptical of both parties.” She added: “What we hear from young people a lot is: they want to see results.”
And the results they crave are, above all, about the economy and cost of living. Janfaza told me that there’s been a longtime misconception among pundits that young voters are obsessed with identity and the culture war — but, she argues, that was never quite true, and it’s even less true now.
“Now, climate and abortion do not even make it into the top issues that young people are saying they care about,” Janfaza said. “And it doesn’t mean that they don’t care about those issues, but the economic concern just ranks much higher.”
Indeed, she believes that the “flirtation with socialism” among some young voters is really more about policies such as affordable housing, affordable health care, and affordable education — as well as a promise to break with the status quo. “That’s really what young people are hungry for.”
Key to young people’s worldview is that they’re feeling increasingly pessimistic about that status quo. One striking finding in the Harvard Youth Poll was that, when asked whether they expected to be financially better or worse off than their parents when they reach their age, more said worse — a first-time finding for the poll.
“I think you see that in the numbers that there’s a level of nihilism amongst young voters,” Mayer said. “They’re basically giving Democrats another chance. But I worry that this is kind of our last chance to get them to believe in democracy.”
And, he worried, if Democrats don’t deliver actual improvements to their lives, “they’ll be gone for good.”
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been re-elected to a historic fourth term as Brazil’s President after a tight race with far-right opponent, Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President and Donald Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula won with 51.8% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 48.2%, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court announced. Sunday’s vote was a rematch after neither reached an outright majority in the first round on Oct. 4. Lula had trailed then, becoming now the first presidential candidate since Brazil’s return to democracy in 1985 to finish second in the initial vote and win the run-off.
The election also marks a remarkable win for the global left, as it bucks a trend of right-wing electoral victories across Latin America. Lula will serve for another four-year term beginning on Jan. 5, 2027.
“I want to thank the generosity of the Brazilian youth who took to the streets, who went to the streets to defend democracy,” Lula said in his victory speech on Sunday night. “I want to thank the elderly. I saw scenes today of people being carried by their grandchildren to vote, people unable to move around, people with cancer and other illnesses. And people went to vote because we managed to convince them that voting was very important to ensure democracy in the country.”
“This election was a defeat for denialism, a defeat for lies,” he continued.
Bolsonaro, however, said late on Sunday that he would not concede defeat to Lula and would seek an annulment of the result. The senator for Rio de Janeiro said a ruling by the Supreme Court to extend voting for two hours, citing public transport issues, was “unacceptable.”
Nevertheless, several liberal leaders around the world have already lauded the result.
“Long live democracy, the people of Brazil won,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney posted, “The relationship between Canada and Brazil has flourished under our partnership. Let’s seize this opportunity to make it even stronger, together — to create major new trade opportunities, protect the environment, and build greater prosperity for both our peoples.”
Several U.S. lawmakers have also congratulated Lula on the result, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Rep. Ro Khanna (D, Calif.), California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
A former metalworker and union leader, Lula co-founded the Workers’ Party in 1980 and continues to serve as its honorary president. He served as Brazil’s President between 2003 to 2011, before he was jailed from 2018 to 2019 on corruption convictions that were later annulled. He went on to defeat incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro in 2022, winning his third presidential term.
Lula’s campaign focused on labor reform, welfare benefits, and affordability. At a time when public debt as a share of GDP has risen to its highest level since the pandemic, Lula cited his achievements in lowering poverty rates, as well as reducing unemployment, illiteracy, and deforestation to record lows. He pledged to make public transit free on the weekends, a program that would need congressional approval. He also increased benefits under his signature Bolsa Família program and championed a landmark constitutional amendment shortening the working week, which Congress approved.
Bolsonaro, meanwhile, campaigned on harsher criminal penalties, tougher policing, lower taxes, and cuts to government spending. His campaign highlighted a corruption investigation involving Lula’s son and a pension fraud scandal that spanned both Lula’s and Jair Bolsonaro’s administrations.
Bolsonaro also called for amnesty for his father, Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence under house arrest after being found guilty of plotting a coup to overturn his defeat in the 2022 election.
In his election night speech, Lula pledged to strengthen federal involvement in public security, expand education and healthcare, and develop Brazil’s technological and artificial intelligence industries.
“This country will not be built by me,” he said. “But by you.”
Lula’s win pumps the brakes on the broader political shift towards the right in Latin America. Colombia, Peru, Costa Rica, and Chile elected right-wing presidents in recent election cycles, reversing an earlier “pink tide” of left-wing governments.
Lula’s victory also denies Trump another political ally in Latin America, which include Argentinian President Javier Milei and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.
Bolsonaro had portrayed himself as an ally of Trump, courting closer ties with Washington and backing U.S. terrorist designations for Brazil’s major criminal gangs. Reuters reported on Saturday, citing current and former U.S. officials, that two U.S. State Department officials had pushed sanctions and other measures intended to weaken Lula and help return the Bolsonaros to power. The State Department did not comment specifically on the reported efforts but told Reuters that “all actions taken by the United States against narco-traffickers and to protect free speech are to defend the rights and lives of the American people. The Brazilian people have the right to choose their leaders through free and fair elections.”
Trump previously expressed support for Jair Bolsonaro and labelled Lula a “radical left lunatic” during Brazil’s 2022 presidential election. He also criticized the criminal prosecution of Bolsonaro, calling it a “witch hunt” and demanding it end.
Trump has not reacted to the election results as of early Monday. After Bolsonaro led in the first round on Oct. 4, Trump called the result “close, but a very, very big victory.” His son, Donald Trump Jr., posted earlier criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision to extend voting hours and what he described as the lack of American mainstream media coverage of it.
Lula had warned that Bolsonaro would surrender Brazil’s sovereignty to Trump.
Lula has publicly sparred with Trump on multiple occasions. He accused the Trump Administration of interfering in Brazil’s election and imposing punitive tariffs on Brazil under alleged pressure from the Bolsonaros. The Bolsonaro family and the U.S. State Department denied the allegations.
At the same time, Lula has pursued closer ties with China, Brazil’s largest trading partner and the U.S.’s geopolitical rival, although he rejected subordination and said Brazil was not choosing between the two countries.
“This country will not accept being anyone’s backyard,” Lula said on Sunday night.
Analysts, however, warned that Lula’s political influence could wane despite his re-election. Earlier this month, Brazil elected its most conservative National Congress since the 1980s. Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) and allied parties could control majorities in both chambers, with more than 280 of 513 seats in the lower house and up to 50 of 81 seats in the Senate.
That could make it difficult for Lula to pass his legislative agenda, analysts said.
But Lula shrugged off those concerns and promised to work with the more conservative Congress to govern for all Brazilians.
“The day after tomorrow, the 27th, I turn 81 years old, and I want to make a commitment in front of the press and in front of you,” Lula said. “I will have the best term a President has ever had in the history of this country”
Pennsylvania is the worst hit state, with at least 1,338 cases of measles confirmed in 44 counties so far this year, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
(Image credit: Matt Rourke)
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