Lula's victory alone cannot loosen the US and Israeli grip on Latin America
1 November 2026
Brazil's president has defied Trump and condemned the
genocide in Gaza, but a divided electorate and powerful right-wing neighbours
limit hopes of a regional shift
“Lula won! Lula won!" a Brazilian student shouted
at a language school in Cairo. An Argentine activist sent a similar message. A
pan-Arab news channel filled the screen with images of packed streets in Sao
Paulo.
The excitement over Brazilian President Luiz Inacio
Lula da Silva's fourth term is real, and it is shared by his supporters at home
and by progressives across neighbouring countries. It is also exaggerated,
especially when paired with hopes of a regional swing to the left and a
distancing from the US and Israel.
Argentina, the homeland of exaggeration, offers a
quick example.
After Alberto Fernandez defeated incumbent Mauricio
Macri in 2019, a jubilant Peronist movement began imagining a regional
realignment.
A Trotskyist activist from the southern suburbs of
Buenos Aires captured the mood: "We already have AMLO [Andres Manuel Lopez
Obrador] in Mexico, and now we must go for Brazil. Can you imagine Lula being
re-elected? Latin America would be leftist once again!"
The optimism was understandable. Lula walked out of
prison two weeks after the Argentine vote, and a candidate endorsed by US
President Donald Trump had lost for the first time.
Fernandez took office in December 2019 and did not
live up to the hype. A month later, he made his first foreign
trip as president to
Israel, a gesture that one seasoned Argentine-Israeli foreign policy analyst
read as a bid for Washington's goodwill ahead of talks over a $44bn debt to the
International Monetary Fund.
Fernandez had also inherited a hostile neighbourhood.
Jair Bolsonaro had taken office in Brasilia in January 2019, and Jeanine Anez
took power in La Paz that November, consolidating the region's conservative
Blue Tide.
Most importantly, Trump had entered the White House in
January 2017 with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. That
September, Benjamin Netanyahu became the first sitting Israeli prime minister
to visit Latin America, touring Argentina, Colombia and
Mexico, and returned for Bolsonaro's inauguration.
Fernandez's victory, in short, did not deliver the
realignment the optimists had imagined. In the little time he had before the Covid-19 pandemic, he used Israel to draw closer to the US.
This is not to say that Lula will follow in his
footsteps. It is to point out the limits that domestic, regional and global
politics impose, and to moderate expectations accordingly.
A divided electorate
Lula's latest victory is no small feat. He is the
first democratically elected president of Brazil to win a third and now a
fourth term, and the first since
1985 to win a runoff
after finishing second in the first round.
Laudable as they are, these achievements reveal how
hard his party has found it to renew its leadership, and not for want of
trying.
The Workers' Party (PT) made its first attempt at
renewal in 2010, electing Dilma Rousseff to succeed Lula as president. She was
re-elected in 2014, impeached in 2016 and failed to win a Senate seat in 2018.
Her return looks all the more distant now that she presides over the New
Development Bank, established by Brics.
The party then passed the baton to Fernando Haddad,
who became its presidential candidate in 2018 after the electoral court barred
the imprisoned Lula from running. Haddad lost to Bolsonaro.
Lula returned as the PT's candidate to defeat
Bolsonaro in 2022 and, four years later, Bolsonaro's son, Senator Flavio
Bolsonaro. In both cases the margins were razor thin: less than two percentage
points the first time, under four the second.
Three days before the final vote, Datafolha had the two candidates tied at 50 percent of valid
votes. More telling still were the rejection rates: 46 percent for Flavio
Bolsonaro and 45 percent for Lula. These figures reveal the frustration and
polarisation behind Lula's victory.
The polarisation is written on the map, too, along the
historical divide between the wealthy south and the poor north. Flavio
Bolsonaro swept the three southern states, Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro
and the centre-west, while Lula took all nine states of the northeast. Compared
with 2022, only two states changed hands.
Lula's victory leaves the PT's succession problem
unresolved and Brazil's electorate deeply divided, while offering little
evidence of the wider leftward shift his supporters hope to see across Latin
America. Trump's second term is a reminder of what entrenched leaders and
polarised electorates can do to a democracy.
The reactionary international
Lula's victory is the exception in Latin America: it
follows a wave of right-wing election wins across the continent since Trump
returned to the White House in January 2025. The right has won elections in
Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Peru and Ecuador.
The Argentine scholar Juan Gabriel Tokatlian has
described the rise of a "reactionary
international":
an Anglo-Saxon invention with peripheral franchises, driven by anger at
history, politics and morality, and always in search of a scapegoat.
Trump, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Reform UK leader
Nigel Farage have found their matches in Jair Bolsonaro, Argentine President
Javier Milei and Colombian President Abelardo de la Espriella.
This network of populist, socially conservative and
economically liberal leaders has revitalised relations between Latin America
and the US.
Trump endorsed presidential candidates Nasry Asfura in Honduras and de la
Espriella in Colombia, as
well as Flavio Bolsonaro, and embraced presidents Jose Antonio Kast of Chile,
Nayib Bukele of El Salvador and Daniel Noboa of Ecuador.
Before Argentina's midterm elections in October 2025,
the Trump administration arranged a $20bn lifeline to prop up the peso and Milei's coalition. In
September 2026, it diverted $52m in military aid from Iraq, Tunisia and two Nato members to right-wing governments in
Colombia, Ecuador, Panama and Peru.
Indeed, the Trump administration has invested heavily
in the reactionary international, above all in Latin America. Such meddling,
electoral and financial, is itself a trait of the network: a cross-border
solidarity that tramples on state sovereignty and international law.
Most worrying is the "Donroe
Doctrine", Trump's
message that all means necessary will be used to support and propagate the
network across Latin America.
In its name, US forces have been bombing boats in the
Caribbean since September 2025, killing more than 100 people in extrajudicial
strikes. In January, they kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas,
killing 100 soldiers in the raid. Since February, they have enforced a fuel blockade on Cuba that UN experts have called "energy starvation".
Washington wants to dominate the hemisphere and lead
its wing of the reactionary international by political, economic and military
means. Governments in the region now face rising, and sometimes deadly, costs
for refusing to yield to US demands.
Lula has already defied Trump, with results and
bruises to show for it. When Trump hit Brazil with 50-percent
tariffs in 2025 to punish
it for prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro, Lula refused to bend. The US Supreme Court
struck down those emergency tariffs in February, only for Washington to replace
them with a 25-percent
duty in July.
Lula took the case to the World Trade
Organization, and
within a month Trump called Lula and bilateral
talks resumed.
Impressive, yes. Cost-free, no. Lula has been unable
to return US tariffs to their previous rates and has been forced to find new
markets.
Israel's foothold
If Lula has struggled to hold his ground against
Washington, progressive forces elsewhere in the region have fared worse, unable
to push back against the Blue Tide and the reactionary international. That
failure keeps the door open for Israel's continued presence in Latin America.
Relations between Latin America and Israel have had
their ups and downs, reflecting the wider mood of international politics.
Diplomatic missions opened in the 1950s. In the decade that followed, the
abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960 and the spread of leftist
governments created friction.
Even so, when the UN General Assembly declared Zionism a form of racism in 1975, most governments in
Latin America and the Caribbean voted against the resolution or abstained. Only
Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Guyana and Grenada supported it.
At the same time, Israel was finding customers. From
the 1970s, it armed some of the region's most brutal regimes, among them
Argentina's military junta, Augusto Pinochet's Chile, El Salvador's death-squad
governments and Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua.
The progressive Pink Tide of the 2000s then tried to
strike a balance. One after another, countries from Brazil to Honduras recognised the state of Palestine in 2010 and 2011, and a growing number of leaders
criticised Israel's conduct during its 2009 and 2014 wars on Gaza. In 2014,
Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru and El Salvador recalled their
ambassadors.
Then came Trump, elected as the Pink Tide receded,
followed by Netanyahu's tour. Guatemala moved its embassy to Jerusalem in 2018
and Honduras did the same in 2021. In 2019 and 2020, Argentina, Paraguay,
Guatemala, Honduras and Colombia declared Hezbollah a terrorist organisation at Washington's urging. In
2019, Jair Bolsonaro and Chile's then-president, Sebastian Pinera, both visited
Israel.
Underpinning all of this, once again, are arms sales and surveillance technology. Argentina has bought Israeli gunboats, Colombia an air defence system and Mexico the NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. Flavio Bolsonaro
campaigned on a promise to move Brazil's embassy to Jerusalem, and Netanyahu
addressed his campaign launch by video.
Lula's limits
Lula may be prepared to stand up to Israel and the US.
He has shown as much by confronting Trump over tariffs, withdrawing Brazil's
ambassador from Tel Aviv, calling Israel's war on Gaza, which has killed more
than 74,000 Palestinians, a genocide, and joining South Africa's case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
He is nearly alone in Latin America in being both
willing and able to do so. Israel knows that commercial ties keep the door to
political influence open, especially while Trump sits in the White House.
The excitement over Lula's win as a victory for
democratic and progressive values is justified, even as his party struggles to
renew its leadership.
The expectation that it will set off a regional domino
effect, reviving the progressive movement and distancing the region from
Washington and Tel Aviv, is not. Lula alone cannot roll back US and Israeli
influence in the region.
Not all is bad news. Argentina's 2027 presidential
election offers Lula a chance to recruit an ally, and when Brasilia and Buenos
Aires align, the region moves.
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