A Global Anti-Right Backlash
On a hazy Monday morning in Chandigarh, a city in northern India, Anish Gawande woke up early to check the news he had fallen asleep waiting for. Some nine thousand miles and eight time zones away, Brazil’s President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had emerged the winner of his country’s Presidential runoff, a victory that two weeks earlier had seemed improbable. But the left-wing incumbent defied the polls and the prediction markets, mounted a campaign that turned tens of thousands out into the streets, mobilized countless more through social-media apps, and pulled in millions of voters who had not cast their ballot for him in the first round, earlier in the month. Lula’s comeback was inspiring to Gawande, a national spokesperson of one of India’s opposition parties and a voluble critic, on the evening news shows and social media, of the right-wing Hindu-nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In 2020, Gawande had protested the Modi government’s hosting of Brazil’s then President, Jair Bolsonaro—the convicted coup-plotting father of Flávio Bolsonaro, the far-right challenger whom Lula defeated Sunday—as India’s chief guest for its annual Republic Day commemorations. Bolsonaro’s documented homophobia and his acceleration of the deforestation of the Amazon rain forest seemed, to Gawande, an echo of the divisive, destructive politics of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
In recent months, Gawande has supported and defended the Gen Z uprising that has rocked Modi’s rule, with authorities unable to stamp out rolling protests in New Delhi and other Indian cities. The mass demonstrations, Gawande told me, have “revived the space for dissent in the country,” amid widespread anger over both an economy that has failed to create enough jobs for India’s huge population of young people and an increasingly autocratic politics where more than a hundred and thirty million people have been knocked off voter rolls on dubious grounds. Gawande saw a lesson in Lula’s ability to rally a diverse coalition of movements and parties in the perceived defense of Brazilian democracy. “What Lula’s victory demonstrates is that perhaps it is possible to craft solidarities between these movements, to assemble a rainbow coalition that can take on the might of Modi’s B.J.P.,” Gawande told me. He posted on Instagram, “If it happened in Brazil, it can happen in India.”
In this optimism, Gawande was joined by politicians far afield. After years of gloom in the shadow of President Donald Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, and others of their ilk, progressives and liberals around the world are finding cause to celebrate. The center-left Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, who has called a snap election in the coming weeks against an emboldened right, declared, “What has happened in Brazil will happen in Spain,” adding, “The comeback of global progressivism has just begun.” Dominique de Villepin, a former French Prime Minister, said that Lula’s victory is “a major signal of hope,” even for France, where the far right is favored to win power in the Presidential elections next year, and where mass protests continue around the country. “The democrats have won the first round of a grand global referendum on democracy,” he wrote on X about Lula’s win.
Like the triumphalism of many from the West’s far right in earlier election cycles, such enthusiasm may be short-lived, a moment of transcendence soon to be subsumed by the churn of polarization and the sclerosis of daily politics. Sánchez’s plans on keeping his job hinge on, at best, cobbling together enough votes to form a stronger coalition than the minority government he currently leads. In India, the B.J.P. retains outsized control over the apparatus of state, the media, and the courts. In Brazil, inflation is high and public debt is surging, and the legislature and state governments are dominated by Lula’s opponents. But his win has blocked what seemed an inexorable advance of the right across Latin America, where left-leaning governments have fallen in rapid succession over the past two years, and has thwarted the Bolsonaros’ broader project of judicial overhaul at home and the potential yoking of Brazil’s foreign policy to Trump’s hemispheric agenda. Ahead of the runoff, Lula cast himself as the defender of Brazilian sovereignty from the predations of Washington and U.S. tech giants, and as the ally of working people against callous élites—he didn’t shy away from his own brand of populism. In the election’s aftermath, Bolsonaro briefly attempted to claim that the result was illegitimate, but he saw right-wing heads of state in South America recognize Lula’s victory. On Wednesday, Bolsonaro, who is under investigation for corruption, money laundering, and tax evasion, for accepting millions of dollars from a disgraced financier to produce a movie about his father, landed in Miami after fleeing Brazil. (Bolsonaro has not been formally charged and has denied any wrongdoing.)
Between the defeat of Bolsonaro this past week and events earlier this year in Hungary, where the long-ruling nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was ousted in elections, the White House has lost two hugely symbolic allies in its broader right-wing global culture war. By Wednesday, no clear winner had emerged in the Israeli election, in which Trump had endorsed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and which saw a historic turnout of Arab voters. And the U.S. President may be humbled further in next week’s midterms, as Democrats eye taking both the House and the Senate. Former President Barack Obama, while stumping for Democrats in Ohio, blasted the Republicans in terms that would have been familiar in Brazil and elsewhere, pointing to the wealthy élites and tech titans who “are able to buy and sell elections like never before,” in service of a Republican Party that “now seems to stand for corrupt government, or inept government, or no government.”
Lula withstood an anti-incumbency challenge on the same day that another once indomitable leader succumbed to one. The Serbian President, Aleksandar Vučić, a close Orbán ally, an erstwhile friend of the Kremlin, and a right-wing strongman effectively in power since 2012, saw his bid to stay in office by running to be Prime Minister foiled by an upstart student movement. The slate of candidates from its de-facto party, called the Student List, outperformed Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party, and he conceded. The students had been protesting since 2024, when the deadly collapse of a canopy outside a train station in the city of Novi Sad triggered a revolt over perceived state corruption and mismanagement. The protests, which were met at times with sweeping police repression, were resilient, and morphed into a strategic political project that persevered in the face of Vučić’s tactics, which included using state-media channels to tar the students as foreign stooges abetting a deep-state globalist agenda. Now they are trying to figure out how to form the next government in Belgrade, and, like Orbán’s opponents in Hungary, they have embarked on a campaign to reinforce the rule of law in the country and to purge state institutions of those who enabled their autocratic capture.
Those efforts are being mirrored elsewhere. “The vision of Serbian youth converges with that of many other young Europeans,” Nathalie Tocci, an Italian political scientist and former foreign-policy adviser to top E.U. officials, wrote in La Stampa. She pointed to the series of protests convulsing the Continent: there’s the Flamingo movement in Albania—where demonstrations have pulled in a cross-section of society, including students and professionals, infuriated by the government’s handling of a project backed by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to open a luxury resort along a coastal ecological preserve, and have surfaced wider public rage against oligarchs in the country. And then there are those who have marched in recent weeks in France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, calling for access to affordable housing, relief with the cost of living, and greater investment in their schools. “It is a vision of democracy, equality, and social, environmental, international, and intergenerational justice,” Tocci added. “A vision and a commitment expressed through street protests.”
Of course, that’s not the universal view of the unrest. In the chaotic recent scenes from Paris and other French cities, in particular, members of the American and European right have sought confirmation for their culture-war talking points, laying the blame for the vandalism, fires on the boulevards, and looting on Muslim migrants and the alleged leftist extremists who appease them. Online, some Republicans and their supporters linked the chaos to the supposedly globalist world view of Democrats, invoking the spectral menace of communists and jihadists storming through the West’s fallen capitals. But that hysteria misses deeper realities, including the entrenched traditions of confrontational protest in France.
Political Islam has nothing to do with these protests. The unrest began with students unhappy about conditions in their schools and universities, but ballooned into something far larger, activating a swathe of French society that reviles the perceived neoliberalism of President Emmanuel Macron and wants to see greater public investment. It also pulled in apolitical opportunists who participated in the looting, while the government blamed the “ultra left.” Like the Gen Z protests in New Delhi earlier this summer, the protests, which were largely peaceful, were met at times with a crushing police response. Yet some observers have warned that the actions of a minority of the crowd—ransacking businesses and an arson attack that gutted the town hall of Limoges—may be strengthening the hand of the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Macron is profoundly unpopular, complicating the path for a centrist successor next year. The protesters see their revolutionary zeal as offering a kind of renewal to a flagging French republic—one of their slogans is “On refait 1789 pour ne pas revenir en 1939,” that is, “We are redoing 1789 so as not to return to 1939.” Whether a majority of French voters will be persuaded by the spectacle of the barricades remains to be seen.
There’s no simple narrative bringing together all the separate uprisings. “They are dispersed points of resonance that still need to be tuned to one another,” the Belgian philosopher Michel Feher told an interviewer. Sánchez, in Spain, called the snap election when his ruling coalition was unable to pass housing legislation that many Spaniards had been demanding. In India, anger over the administration of school-board exams snowballed into a larger rebellion against Modi’s illiberal, majoritarian rule. But Matthew Cebul, a researcher on nonviolent resistance movements at the Harvard Kennedy School, sees all these protests as rooted in a universal desire for accountability from one’s government and rage at perceived graft and cronyism. “Illiberal governments thrive on this aura of inevitability or perceived social dominance, but illiberalism is ultimately hollow and vulnerable, especially when it performs poorly,” Cebul told me. He added, “People do not like being governed by crooks and thugs. They want competent governance, not arrogant corruption, and democracy movements can and are winning people over when they call for something better.” ♦