Long post, sorry. I’ve been chewing on this for a few days and this sub is the only place I can think of that will get why it matters to me.

First, some background for non-Brazilians. In the last stretch of this election, a volunteer movement started that people called “Exército do Lula”, or Lula’s Army. On paper it sounds silly. In practice it was one of the most impressive pieces of grassroots organizing I’ve ever seen, and I only found out about it a few days before it was over. My own mother had been inside it the whole time.

What it actually was

This wasn’t a hashtag or a “share this post if you love democracy” thing. It was organized like an actual army, which is a bit funny and also exactly why it worked:

• You enlisted and got a rank. People started as soldiers and could get promoted. It sounds like a gimmick, but think about what a rank tells someone: you belong here, you have a place, and if you show up you can move up.
• You got missions every day. Every morning there were concrete, doable tasks. Not “be engaged” or “spread awareness,” but “do this specific thing today.”
• You got instructions. Exactly what to do, how to do it and when. You didn’t need any political experience. You only had to show up.

By most accounts it mobilized something like 5% of the country. Five percent of Brazil is millions of people. Around 11 million. And it did all of that in about 20 days.

The Google thing

This is the part that made me laugh out loud when my mom explained it. One mission was for everyone to search Google for Bolsonaro’s scandals, all at the same time and in huge numbers. Then Lula would bring those scandals up live, in debates and interviews. Curious viewers would pull out their phones to look up what he was talking about, and the first thing they saw was the very scandal he had just mentioned, sitting at the top of the trending searches and autocomplete.

You can argue about whether that’s clever or cheeky, but it was strategic. Volunteers who would never write an op-ed or knock on a stranger’s door could still do something real, from their couch, in five minutes, and it fed directly into what the campaign was doing on air. That’s what good organizing looks like: you meet people where they are, give them a job that fits their abilities, and connect it to the bigger plan.

My mom

My mom is retired, older, and if I’m honest, bored. She has a yoga class and a group of friends from that class, and that’s most of her social life. I love her, but I didn’t think of her as a political person beyond voting and complaining about the news at dinner.

It turns out her entire yoga class enlisted. All of them. They did their daily missions together, compared notes, and texted each other about it. When my mom finally told me (a few days before the election, very casually, as if she were mentioning a new recipe), she lit up in a way I hadn’t seen in a long time.

That’s what got me. We talk a lot about “the youth vote” and “online engagement,” and we underrate how many older people are sitting at home feeling like the world doesn’t need them anymore. They have time, life experience and a lot of energy that nobody asks for. Lula’s Army asked. It said: we need you, here’s your rank, here’s your mission for today. They showed up because someone finally made them feel like they were part of something.

At the end, every soldier got a certificate. I’ve attached my mom’s. It’s an “Ao Mérito” (For Merit) certificate from the “Ministério da Democracia,” with her name on it, signed off by the commander, honoring her “excellent activity and exemplary conduct” during her service. She is ridiculously proud of it.

She’s also sad. The army has been disbanded now that the election is over, and she misses it. She misses her missions, the group chats, and the feeling that waking up in the morning mattered to something bigger than her own house.

My confession

I’m the politically online one in my family. I read this sub. I have Opinions™ about housing policy, trade and institutional design. I argue with strangers on the internet about the importance of democratic institutions.

And in this election, all I did was vote.

That’s it. I voted, posted a couple of things, and felt good about myself. Meanwhile my retired mom was getting up every morning, taking her orders and carrying them out with her yoga friends for 20 days straight. She was a soldier in a movement, and I was a spectator.

I keep thinking about how many people in every country are sitting at home feeling useless, waiting for someone to hand them a mission. The side that figures out how to reach them is going to win a lot of elections.

So, Mom, if you somehow ever read this: I’m proud of you, Soldier. And next time I’m enlisting with you.

To finish, here’s what Lula said in his victory speech, the line my mom has now quoted to me about fifteen times:

“The Russian army, the Chinese army, the US army. None of them have the power of our army of democracy.”

Donald Trump won big in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley in 2024—but now Latino voters are turning on him.

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For two years, the only Russians Oleh saw were trying to kill him in battle. Now hundreds of them have him surrounded, by his own choice, at a camp for Russian prisoners of war.

Guarding, feeding and treating enemy soldiers is fraught in any country. But Ukrainians working with these P.O.W.’s have the added challenge of knowing that Russian forces invaded their land and committed atrocities, while their own country wants to show the world it treats prisoners with a decency that camp workers may not feel.

They have vastly differing motivations for taking it on. Oleh said that for him, it was about exorcising his hatred.

“I wanted to look them in the eyes,” he said.

For others, it can be curiosity, a contribution to the war effort, or just a paycheck.

Russia’s systematic mistreatment and torture of prisoners of war has been well documented by the United Nations and rights groups. While Ukraine has faced accusations of extreme mistreatment of Russian soldiers, particularly during their apprehension, independent monitors say such cases are far more isolated.

That imbalance is visible in split-screen images of prisoner swaps — skeletal, wounded and ill Ukrainians, traded for healthy-looking Russians. It spurs pain and anger in Ukraine, and profound emotional struggle for many of those who look after Russian prisoners.

Oleh, 58, keeps his job at a camp in Lviv, in western Ukraine, a secret from everyone but his wife. His brothers and nephews are still fighting on the front lines.

“How can I say to them that I am caring for the Russian P.O.W.s?” he asked.

‘This Benefits Ukraine’

Ivan, 42, helped set up Ukraine’s first P.O.W. camp after Russia’s 2022 invasion, and later the one in Lviv. Like all camp employees interviewed, he asked to be identified by only his first name, for security reasons.

From early in the war, Ukrainians saw the atrocities by invading forces in places like Bucha, near Kyiv. Encountering captured Russian troops “was uncomfortable for everyone,” said Ivan, a camp administrator, and “each of us had to cross a certain internal line.”

Prison administrators had to make clear that cruelty was prohibited.

Ukraine takes pains to differentiate itself from Russia, presenting itself to the world as following international law.

While there is always a concern that camp visitors get a sanitized view, the Red Cross, the United Nations and news outlets go there regularly and have interviewed thousands of prisoners. Those organizations have largely been denied access to Russian camps. The Red Cross has trained Ukrainian camp workers on the rights of prisoners under the Geneva Conventions.

The U.N. assistant secretary general for human rights recently reported that in Ukraine’s prison camps, “conditions generally comply with international humanitarian law and have improved since 2022.”

Visiting journalists get largely unfettered access. Several times, The New York Times has visited the Lviv camp, one of the largest, without seeing signs of mistreatment. Workers and prisoners can agree or refuse to talk, often out of earshot of camp staff. (The Times generally does not interview prisoners, whose cooperation could be coerced, or show their faces.)

Ivan said he faced constant criticism from fellow Ukrainians who question why Russian prisoners are treated well.

“People need to understand that this benefits Ukraine,” he said, getting animated. “It shows us as a civilized European country, unlike our enemies.”

Constant Discomfort

Russian prisoners file into the camp cafeteria for a lunch of borscht, stewed meat, pasta and bread.

For Roman, who oversees food and nutrition for P.O.W.s., they are constant, painful reminders.

The Russians have killed people he was close to, he said, and yet works surrounded by “those who did this, while others like them are still doing it now.”

He struggles to keep his emotions in check.

There was a time after his wife’s cousin was killed in combat, he confessed, when it was simply too difficult to go to work. He took a short leave to let the “emotional flame” die down, at least a little.

When he returned, Roman said, he minimized communication with prisoners.

The barrier is “always there,” he said, “and it can’t be otherwise.”

‘They Destroyed Everything’

Oleksii maintains physical, not just emotional, distance from the prisoners.

“I see them as an enemy, someone who would’ve tried to kill you,” he said, standing about 10 feet from two dozen prisoners next to a dirt soccer field.

He said that working at the camp is harder for him than for others, because he is from the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014 and aims to seize entirely.

“They destroyed everything I had,” Oleksii said, adding, “How am I supposed to feel about them?”

Exacting revenge would achieve nothing, and “it would be worse for our country if we didn’t follow these rules, right?”

Still, he said of Russian prisoners, “Knowing what kind of people they are, it’s better to keep your distance.”

Humanity for a Foe

Distance is not an option for Robert, a camp medic, who must make physical contact with P.O.W.s.

At first, that meant an internal skirmish, Robert said, constantly asking himself if his work betrayed his country, his friends in the army, the people who have been killed.

“Everyone has his own cemetery of people who died in the war,” he said.

Robert, 38, learned his patients would be Russians only when he showed up for a trial day. He was briefly taken aback but accepted the role because he saw it as contributing to the war effort and thought it would be “unique, kind of spicy.”

The struggle within him subsided over time, though never completely. He tries not to think about how Russians he heals might return to the fight.

Jumping up from a swivel stool, he rushed into another room and grabbed a small container, shaking it like a rattle. It contained shrapnel the medics had removed from prisoners’ wounds.

His eyes welling and his voice starting to break, he asked why the humanity required to do his work “is it not knocked out, not washed away with tears, not burned out?”

‘I Feel Sorry for Them’

For Maryan, 43, who oversees a workshop where prisoners weave wicker furniture, the job is about compartmentalizing, separating “the moments when you’re just working with them and when you’re fighting them.”

There are sharp blades throughout the shop, but he never feels unsafe.

He said he chats with prisoners in free moments, on smoke breaks, asks how they’re doing, asks about wives and children, and they open up to him.

A wartime enemy becomes abstract. Few people get close enough to hear and smell them, to face them directly.

“Often,” Maryan said, “I feel sorry for them.”

Some prisoners have told him they were promised work in field kitchens only to find themselves on the front line, he said. Others said they enlisted to offset financial woes. Most were “deceived by their own state,” he said.

Maryan said he could feel empathy for prisoners and still be pained by Russia’s actions. Once, he said, a former member of his furniture crew who had been released in a prisoner swap walked back into the workshop and waved, having been captured again.

While “it was a very strange moment,” Maryan said, he was glad.

“It’s better that he’s here doing something useful,” he said, “than killing my fellow citizens.”

Letting Go of Hatred

Oleh, who conceals his work from nearly everyone, was initially shocked by the offer to run a construction workshop at a P.O.W. camp.

He had been a soldier, wounded in combat against the Russians. “I was used to seeing them through my gun scope,” Oleh said.

He hated them and struggled to see how he could stomach being around them. Then he realized he needed to try.

“I wanted to see if I would be able to forgive them, to treat them as humans,” he said as an air-raid siren wailed over the sound of a circular saw.

He needed to know “if I would live all my life with this hatred,” he added.

In his first days at the camp, Oleh said, he walked around dazed, sizing up the prisoners. They looked, he said, like a gray mass. Pathetic. He was surprised to feel no anger.

Soon he was having conversations with prisoners.

“I needed to know how a person decides to invade another country and start killing people,” he said.

Now he sees them as mere humans, and he feels lighter.

While he can sympathize with the prisoners, Oleh said he forbids himself from feeling any fondness. Forgiving does not mean forgetting.

“Too many of my people have died for me to just let it go,” he said.

Oleh hopes to return to combat. If he encountered a freed prisoner from his crew there, he said, he would “shoot without hesitation.”

“But now,” he said, “I will do it without hatred.”

After the piece below had been drafted, news came in of a third development that was perhaps even more consequential than the two described, the victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, in the second round of the Brazilian presidential election. His defeat of the right-wing populist Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, was unexpected after a first round in which the latter ended up with the largest plurality of votes. Lula’s victory broke a string of seven consecutive right-wing victories in Latin American presidential elections. Flávio Bolsonaro has called for the election to be annulled, and it is at this point uncertain what his followers will do in reaction to Lula’s victory. Nonetheless, given Brazil’s size and importance on the world stage, this is a stunning and hopeful development that may signal, together with the developments in Venezuela and Serbia and the upcoming U.S. midterm elections, a major reversal of the wave of authoritarian-populist victories around the world.

—Frank

Sunday October 25 saw two very hopeful events from different parts of the world. They give us some optimism that democratic backsliding is not inevitable, and that it is possible to fight back against the rising tide of authoritarianism.

The first was the return of María Corina Machado to Venezuela. Machado should rightfully be president of Venezuela today. She sought to run against Nicolás Maduro during the July 2024 presidential election, and attracted huge enthusiastic crowds all over Venezuela during her primary campaign. Because of the threat she posed, she was disqualified by the regime; her stand-in, Edmundo Gonzalez, went on to win the election by a huge margin.

We know this because the democratic opposition kept voter records from each polling place in the country, and published them before the regime could declare its own falsified results naming Maduro the winner. Machado had to then go into exile to accept her Nobel Peace Prize, and has been living out of the country until this past weekend. Her return was marked by the same rapturous crowds cheering her that had come out during her election campaign two and a half years earlier.

The current situation in Venezuela following the Trump administration’s arrest of Maduro in early January is completely unsustainable and unjust. Trump made a deal with Delcy Rodríguez Maduro’s, vice president and member of his inner circle, to stabilize the country as the United States sought to take control of the country’s oil assets. Venezuela since then has been run by the same authoritarian clique that existed previously, with a pliable Rodríguez substituting for a resistant Maduro. Trump made no pretense that any of this was being done for the benefit of the Venezuelan people, bragging instead that he had put the United States in control of the country’s oil. As he told the UN General Assembly in September, “to the victors go the spoils.” Worse than that, there has been no transparency regarding where any of the oil revenues were going, or even how large they were. The administration revealed that it was working with Alejandro Betancourt, a businessman notorious all over Venezuela for his corruption.

In the meantime, Trump sidelined Machado, claiming that “she doesn’t have respect within the country.” To the contrary, she was by far Venezuela’s most popular politician. The State Department claimed that there would eventually be democratic elections, but without specifying a timetable, and held talks with various opposition groups that excluded Machado. Neither the regime nor the United States permitted her to go back to her country, and at the present moment we don’t know how she managed to return.

Her return puts both the Rodríguez regime and the Trump administration in a difficult position. Much as they might like to, neither can afford to arrest or otherwise silence the most popular politician in the country, certainly not in the face of the rapturous crowds greeting her. Machado has spent the time since January trying to placate Trump, giving him her Nobel Prize and refraining from public criticism of the United States.

But this kind of appeasement has never worked with this president, who has no interest in Venezuelan democracy. There is growing anger at the United States among ordinary Venezuelans, who naturally would like to know where money from their oil patrimony is going. Delcy could buy temporary peace, but as time goes on, the corrupt deal she struck with Trump is going to be a huge liability. Machado needs to get behind what would amount to an anti-corruption protest. It is likely that anti-American (and anti-Delcy) protests will gain momentum, and it is only at that moment that people in Washington may realize that a legitimate election is the only route to long-term stability.

Trump thinks that he is in control of the situation, but he is not; only the Venezuelan people have the right and ultimately the power to create a legitimate government.

The second rather miraculous event occurring Sunday was the victory of the Student List over the ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) in Serbia’s parliamentary election, and strongman Alexander Vučić’s concession. Most informed observers fervently wished for Vučić’s defeat, but believed that in the end he and his party had enough levers to intimidate voters and manipulate the process. Vučić had been in power in one capacity or another—he recently resigned as president so he could become prime minister under an SNS-led government—such that many young Serbs had known no other leader than him.

The roots of the Student List victory lay in the student movement that emerged following the lethal collapse of the roof of a train station in the city of Novi Sad in November 2024. The station, a Chinese project, was riddled with corruption linked to the regime, and students across the country started mobilizing in protest.

There had been many protest movements previously in Serbia, including the one that brought down Slobodan Milošević back in October 2000. This movement, however, was deliberately organized in a way that minimized the measures that the regime could take against it. It had no leaders and no evident hierarchy. There were no immediate political demands except for an end to corruption; the movement was able to organize gigantic protests in Belgrade and other Serbian cities on this basis. In 2025, the students began marching across the country, stopping in villages and towns where they were frequently greeted by rural sympathizers. In organizing ahead of Sunday’s election, they deliberately did not include prominent politicians or existing opposition parties in the Student List. A large number of the Student List’s members are in fact academics. The movement did not put forward any detailed accounts of the programs it would pursue were it to win the election, or even who would be likely to emerge as the prime minister under those circumstances.

In response to this broad mobilization, the Vučić regime employed all of the tools that have by now become commonplace among rising authoritarians. There was massive manipulation of the electoral process itself, and the disqualification of many popular personalities. A huge number of Serbs, many of whom were sympathetic to the Student List, live outside the country; the government made it very difficult for them to vote. The state controlled most of the legacy media in Serbia, putting newspapers and TV channels in the hands of friendly oligarchs and making it hard for the opposition to get its message out.

Nonetheless, the students evidently benefited from the generational shift that was taking place in media consumption all over the world. Young people got most of their information online from sources beyond the regime’s control, and made an art of leaderless mobilization in the two years of protesting.

Now that the Student List has won the parliamentary election, however, the very tactics that allowed them to achieve this victory will become a major liability. The new parliamentary majority will now actually be responsible for governing the country. This cannot be done without a leadership hierarchy or a concrete policy program.

The Student List was able to attract a broad coalition of followers by not being specific about its intentions, but there will clearly be tensions among the groups supporting it. The electoral practice of avoiding existing politicians and members of other parties means that no one on the list has actual experience running a government. Other movements built around civil society organizations, like those in Ukraine in 2004 or Egypt in 2011, ultimately failed because of their inability to make the transition to the responsibilities of governance.

These obvious challenges make me wonder whether Vučić was being clever in conceding defeat so quickly. Had he tried to hang on through the usual tactics of intimidation and fraud, he would have faced continuing protests. He may have calculated that the Student List was like the proverbial dog finally catching the car it was chasing and not knowing what to do with it. A failed transition might then create the conditions for him and the SNS to return to power.

Let’s hope that this is not the case. At this point, Serbia’s outside friends need to give it every possible form of support, and focus especially on building the Student List’s ability to govern. While its victory and Machado’s return to Venezuela are hopeful developments, there are a huge number of things that need to happen in both countries in the coming weeks and months to turn either of them into a sustainable victory for democracy.

In the meantime, however, we can enjoy the fact that the spirit of democracy is still alive in different parts of the world. The most important election of all will occur in the United States, where American voters will have the opportunity of rejecting a Republican Party that has been dominated by a right-wing authoritarian, Donald Trump. If this happens we will have clear evidence that democracy, far from being a dying doctrine, has strength and vitality in many different parts of the world.

Submission Statement: The head of German automaker Audi defended on Sunday the company's planned $4 billion investment in a ‌new US plant, announced by President Donald Trump as he campaigns for the November midterm elections.

Audi Chief Executive Gernot Doellner stood alongside Trump at a rally in Perry, near Macon in central Georgia on Saturday, as the US president said Audi, part of the Volkswagen Group , planned to build an assembly plant in Georgia that will produce 200,000 SUVs annually.

"This decision was preceded by many months of careful planning and intense negotiations," Doellner told reporters on Sunday. "If the American president invites you, you accept the invitation. That is what respect for the office and for the country in which we invest demands."

Georgia has competitive election races for the US Senate and its governor and Trump is eager to make the case that his auto tariffs are helping the US economy and boosting US manufacture.

In Germany, the tariffs have added to the pressures on European industry and tension between Volkswagen management and workers, who face job cuts and possible plant closures.
Trump's tariffs on autos, steel, aluminum and parts cost Audi around €1.2 billion ($1.4 billion) last year as it imports all its vehicles for the US market from Europe or Mexico, Audi has said.

Christiane Benner, head of the IG Metall union and Volkswagen's deputy supervisory board chair, said it was "right and necessary" to improve the company's position on the US market with a new plant. "However, firm prospects for workers at all sites, particularly those here in Germany, must be clearly defined and set out," she said.

Olaf Lies, state premier of the German state of Lower Saxony, Volkswagen's second-largest shareholder, said ⁠that expanded production in the US was an opportunity provided German workers also benefit.

"Growth in America must secure jobs and value creation here and must not displace them," he said.

Submission Statement: Sources from three countries confirm that the Trump Administration has advocated Viktor Orbán for the role of United Nations Secretary-General. The U.S. has encouraged the former Hungarian Prime Minister to enter the race, even bringing him the initial idea. The plan awaits a final decision.

A Trump State Department official concedes that it sounds crazy at first. But Russia and China are believed to be supportive, based on prior conversations with Washington, and the plan would be for Mr. Orbán to be their joint candidate. As officials from the U.S. and a second country told us, when the U.S., Russia and China all want the same thing at the U.N. Security Council, they usually get it.

The State Department official counted eight Security Council votes “comfortably” for Mr. Orbán, and 10 within reach from the 15 council members. Would Britain and France then stand in the majority’s way? Those two are typically cautious in their use of the veto power.

As U.S. officials discussed who they would want to see atop the U.N., Mr. Orbán’s name kept coming up. “Someone like Orbán,” they would say, and Chinese and Russian counterparts would agree. Eventually U.S. officials asked themselves the question: Why not Mr. Orbán?

U.S. officials reached out to Mr. Orbán in the first place to gauge his interest in the U.N. role. They found him receptive, albeit with reservations as a nationalist politician, and not looking to run unless he is confident he can win. Mr. Orbán declined to comment.

Lana Nusseibeh, a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates, entered the race last week. Emirati support for a bloody paramilitary in the Sudanese civil war will be a liability, but she is qualified and has momentum. On Tuesday she’ll answer questions and on Wednesday a new Security Council straw poll will be held. Other candidates could also get in.

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva came from behind to win Brazil’s runoff election, halting a right-wing wave sweeping Latin America and defying predictions that the 80-year-old political veteran had finally reached the end of his extraordinary career.

Lula took 51% of the vote to Flávio Bolsonaro’s 49%, according to Brazil’s electoral court, with 73% of ballots counted as of 8:48 p.m. Sunday. Datafolha projected Lula the winner. The result followed a messy election day marked by allegations of voter suppression and a last-minute extension of voting hours. It was a stunning comeback, sealed late as voters in Lula’s northeastern stronghold rallied behind one of Latin America’s most prominent opponents of Trumpism.

His reelection for an unprecedented fourth term extends a political career spanning more than four decades and delivers a humiliating blow to the movement built by former President Jair Bolsonaro, whose eldest son sought to carry the family name and MAGA-tinged brand of populism back to the presidential palace.

Already Brazil’s oldest president, Lula now has four more years to steady Latin America’s biggest economy — and try to ease the political polarization laid bare by a bitter campaign. That will be a near-impossible task.

At home, the social reality is that Brazil is split between unreconcilable ideologies. Lula’s identity and convictions were forged by his rise as a trade union leader, resistance to Brazil’s dictatorship and criticism of US military interventions overseas. Those of his arch-nemesis are defined by patriarchal conservatism, evangelical zeal and free-wheeling capitalism.

Lula also faces significant economic headwinds ahead, chief among them tackling rising deficits and debt that have kept interest rates high. That has driven anxieties among investors; more pressing for Lula, it has left Brazilian households drowning in debt, with personal loan defaults rising to their highest levels in two decades.

“He may think he has been given a free pass, but he was reelected in an environment of institutional fragility,” said Creomar de Souza, a political analyst and founder and CEO of Brasilia-based Dharma Political Risk and Strategy. “He will need to be able to build a coalition, even as his victory sends a strong message to the radical right, which will have to rethink how it operates.”

Lula ended his second consecutive term in 2010 with an approval rating of 83%, the kind of number politicians can only dream of today. Barack Obama, whose presidency overlapped with Lula’s final two years in office, famously called him “the most popular politician on Earth.”

But those days are long gone. Successive versions of Lula, tainted by corruption scandals and a stint in jail, saw the shine come off. Even when he staged his first comeback to ward of a second term of Jair Bolsonaro, the sense was that he had brought an old script for Brazil’s long-festering problems and new ones. Public handouts weren’t the answer for a new, younger generation growing up in a gig economy, or uberization of labor.

His refusal to own a mobile phone, until the last week of the campaign, was a telling sign that Lula, who once had his finger on the pulse of nation, was now out of touch.

Indeed, he came perilously close to witnessing the end of his storied career. Bolsonaro, the son and political heir of the former president who led Brazil from 2019 to 2022, won the first round of the election on Oct. 4.

Bolsonaro acted like a man who had already won, probably because no one who came second in the first round had pulled off a runoff reversal since Brazil returned to democracy in 1989. But his confidence was misjudged. If there’s one thing any politician knows about Lula, the great survivor of Brazilian politics, it’s that he doesn’t give up.

The president went on the offensive with a series of measures aimed at easing pressure on household finances. They included an increase in family benefits under the Bolsa Família program, a ban on online gambling, a sweeping plan to refinance consumer debt with private banks, and even the distribution of weight-loss shots through Brazil’s public-health system.

In the final 15 days of the runoff campaign, Lula focused on those who had stayed home in the first round and stepped up efforts to win over undecided voters.

The depth of his connection with poorer voters, particularly in the populous Northeast region that launched his much-eulogized personal history, was evident. It’s what saved him, the loyalty he still inspires among legions of fans.

“The Northeast is going to save this country again,” Antonio Avelino, 73, predicted a week before the election as he drove his taxi through Sao Paulo’s city streets.

Moscow is turning to poorer countries after Kenya and South Africa issued warnings, according to a Ukrainian report seen by Bloomberg.

Russia is stepping up the number of Africans it recruits to counter a personnel shortage in its military and is targeting some of the continent’s most dysfunctional states for manpower, a presentation obtained from people familiar with Ukraine’s intelligence service showed.

The countries included Zimbabwe, Burundi and Sierra Leone in the first nine months of this year after Kenya and South Africa sought to stop men leaving to join Russia’s war against Ukraine, the presentation seen by Bloomberg showed. The program is aimed at “offsetting massive losses and a shortage of people to mobilize,” the presentation reads.

Russia has never publicly acknowledged using foreigners to fight Ukraine. The Kremlin has said the country has enough manpower for the war. President Vladimir Putin last month dismissed speculation that he was about to announce another round of mobilization at home.

But there’s been growing concern in a number of African countries about Russia’s attempts to recruit their citizens. Africa’s comparative poverty means it’s easier to lure people to Russia, often with false promises of civilian jobs in catering or transport.

There also have been offers of substantial signing-on bonuses and salaries as well as a path to Russian citizenship, according to the families of some recruits and a report by Amnesty International last month.

The governments of Botswana and South Africa issued public warnings about accepting lucrative-sounding jobs in Russia. Zimbabwe arrested two Russian citizens it suspected of recruiting for the military.

The Kenyan and Ghanaian governments directly asked Russia to stop the activity. Kenyan politicians have said at least 1,000 citizens have been recruited by Russia. Foreign Minister Musalia Mudavadi traveled to Moscow earlier this year to object.

Russia has now turned its attention to countries with poor democratic credentials, limited press freedom and a weak judiciary, the Ukrainian presentation showed. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, Russia recruited 699 men from Burundi, compared with 30 in all of 2025, and 530 Zimbabweans, up from 65, the presentation says. Other countries that saw significant increases include the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Cameroon.

The presentation included an online advert allegedly used in Zimbabwe showing an African in military uniform and promoting a “program for specialists from Zimbabwe, limited spots.” It urges people to click on a link to take a test to see if they qualify. It doesn’t specifically say that those who sign up will end up on the frontline with Ukraine.

Russia also started recruiting in Madagascar for the first time since its war against Ukraine began. The military took over in a coup last year and has forged closer ties with Moscow, including receiving military equipment and food from Russia.

At the same time, Russia virtually halted military recruitment in at least nine African countries. It’s instead seeking to hire their citizens to work in the defense industry, according to the presentation seen by Bloomberg.

In total, Ukraine has identified 45,959 foreigners who have signed contracts with the Russian military from 151 countries. Of those 5,451 are African.

Further reading:

Putin Swaps Cash for Crosses in Bid for African Influence - Bloomberg

Russia Recruited South Africans for Its War Using a Gaming App - Bloomberg

Brazil, India, Pakistan and South Africa are sitting at debts to GDP at around 82%.

In context of the recent election in Brazil, I wouldn't be too celebratory that the dude who took Brazil's debt to GDP to that of Pakistan is still in charge.

LibGPT, summarize this research paper and tell me why wealth taxes are still bad so my priors remain intact, thanks