Brazil and Serbia Reject the Right. In France, Le Pen Still Polls 35%

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won a fourth term as Brazil’s president on 25 October. With every vote counted, Brazil’s electoral court put him on 51.8%. That left him about 4.4 million votes ahead of Flávio Bolsonaro, a senator and son of former president Jair Bolsonaro. Flávio Bolsonaro refused to concede and asked for the result to be annulled.

That evening in Serbia, President Aleksandar Vučić conceded defeat in a snap parliamentary election. A projection by the monitoring group CESID gave the Student List 138 of the 250 seats and Vučić’s Serbian Progressive Party 104. Turnout was close to 70%, the highest since Yugoslavia broke up in 1992.

Brazil’s result follows a run of wins for the right in Latin America. José Antonio Kast, whom AP describes as far right, took office in Chile in March after winning about 60% of the vote. In June, Colombia elected Abelardo de la Espriella, a conservative endorsed by Donald Trump, by about one percentage point.

Different winners, one shared opponent

Lula’s Workers’ Party sits on the left, while the other recent upsets cross the spectrum. Serbia’s Student List grew out of protests after a station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in 2024, killing 16 people. It calls its campaign non-partisan and focuses on graft, schooling and the rule of law. Reuters describes Vučić as a populist and nationalist, and his party as right-wing.

In Portugal, the centre-left António José Seguro won the presidency in February with 66.7% of the run-off vote. He beat André Ventura, leader of the hard-right Chega party. In April, Viktor Orbán conceded defeat in Hungary after 16 years in power. The winner, Péter Magyar, leads Tisza, a member of the centre-right European People’s Party.

Guillaume Long is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. He thinks Lula’s win may be a turning point for Latin America. “It is too early to declare the region’s rightward turn over,” he wrote. Still, he argued that the victory “raises the possibility that the wave has already crested.”

The losing parties keep large blocs

Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party is the largest force in Brazil’s Congress, with 121 of 513 deputies and 28 of 81 senators. Lula has no majority in Congress. Mayra Goulart, a political scientist at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said lawmakers now control more of the federal budget. That gives them “more independence from the executive”, she said.

Public debt is above 80% of GDP, and interest rates are among the world’s highest. “Brazil’s three big problems are the fiscal problem, the fiscal problem, and the fiscal problem,” said Mauro Rochlin, an economist at the Getulio Vargas Foundation. That Congress will also shape the Amazon, where deforestation fell to a record low this year. About half of the incoming lower house has voted to loosen environmental licensing, according to analysis by the Brazilian outlet Sumaúma.

In Serbia, the Student List has a majority but no obvious leader. Cardiologist Ilija Srdanović heads its list, and its candidates include professors, actors and farmers. “The biggest uncertainty is…who is going to lead the government, who will be the key ministers,” said Radivoje Grujic, a Warsaw-based election consultant.

France is moving the other way

In France, an Elabe poll for BFMTV in September put Le Pen on 34% to 35.5% in the first round. That is 13 to 20 points ahead of any rival. A Toluna Harris Interactive poll for RTL in mid-October gave her 35% to 37%. Her score held after Mediapart reported antisemitic writings attributed to Jordan Bardella, the party’s president, from 2013. He denies writing them.

In July, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld Le Pen’s embezzlement conviction. However, it cut her ban from office enough for her to run. It also reinstated a period of house arrest, which would mean campaigning with an electronic tag. “So tonight, I am a candidate for the presidential election,” she told TF1 that day, adding that she’d campaign without a tag. Adelaide Zulfikarpasic of the pollster Ipsos BVA said the party had never been “measured at such a level” so early in a presidential race.

In Portugal, Ventura lost the presidency by two to one, yet Chega is now the second-largest party in parliament. In Brazil, too, Bolsonaro’s party won the most seats in the lower house. France differs because its hard right leads the race for the top job outright.

Le Pen’s route differs from Meloni’s

Giorgia Meloni’s government in Italy has kept backing Kyiv. “Supporting Ukraine is not an alternative to peace, it’s what makes it possible,” she has said. Le Pen, by contrast, has pledged to end French financial aid to Ukraine and wants EU sanctions on Russia lifted. Her party would also cap France’s net contribution to the EU budget at €5bn a year, down from €8bn.

Eulalia Rubio, a senior research fellow at the Jacques Delors Institute, told Euronews the proposals reflect a “lack of understanding” of EU institutions. Thierry Chopin, adjunct professor of European studies at Sorbonne University, questioned the budget cap. “Obviously, if every member state does this, the EU can no longer function as a union based on the rule of law,” he said.

Bardella has signalled softer positions on Ukraine and pensions, according to the European Council on Foreign Relations. Its analysts still expect Le Pen’s control of the party to rule out a more conciliatory government. A Le Pen presidency “would be a significantly more formidable challenge to European orthodoxies than Giorgia Meloni is in Italy,” they wrote. Arthur de Liedekerke, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, looks at what moderated Meloni. Italy had a pro-European coalition partner and technocratic checks, and he argues France has neither. “France offers no such guarantees,” he wrote.

France votes on 18 April 2027, with a run-off on 2 May. Before then, Serbia’s students must choose a prime minister. Lula must find votes in a Congress where his rival’s party is the largest. Both tests will show whether the winners in Brazil and Serbia can govern with the margins they have.