In Brazil, a decisive majority of voters on Sunday returned left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for a fourth term, defying expectations that Brazilians were ready to discard the fiery trade unionist as yesterday’s man. In Israel’s Tuesday election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the longest-serving premier in his country’s history — lost his parliamentary majority but may have thwarted his opponents from electing a viable governing coalition. Lula, 81, and Netanyahu, 77, have almost nothing in common except their age and political resilience.
They have towered over their countries for more than a generation, outfoxed prosecutors and humiliated electoral rivals, enraged and entranced Washington. They have done it with the loyal support of voters on the left and right who view each man in heroic terms, as a tireless champion of their interests and a shield against the most fearsome enemies. President Donald Trump has, at times, shared those political traits.
If he has one more escape act left in him, it would look more like what we’ve just seen in Israel and Brazil than anything in Trump’s second term so far. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has failed to deliver policy victories that most voters can feel in their own lives, while shedding some of the most important parts of the political identity that forged his populist base. He ran for president in 2024 pledging to whip inflation and railing against needless foreign wars.
Trump’s signature acts this term — passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, waging a global trade war, attempting regime change in Iran — have made health care, consumer goods and energy more expensive. What is his closing message in the midterm election? Trump makes one argument consistently: that Democrats are crazy.
But you’d be hard-pressed to find a convincing through line in a series of campaign-trail monologues boasting about the economy, trashing individual Democratic candidates as weirdos and subversives, musing about renaming oceans, defending the Cheesecake Factory and admiring Jon Husted’s rock-hard bod. Compare this to what voters heard in Brazil and Israel: relentless, ruthless, shameless appeals to the political coalitions that Lula and Netanyahu forged over decades. In Brazil, Lula tapped into the regional and class-based divisions that have defined his electoral career, while offering a buffet of new economic promises to voters in his base.
He hiked welfare payments, promised voters free public transit on weekends and endorsed a shorter workweek. His 45-year-old opponent, Flavio Bolsonaro, stumbled in the final days with a dismissive comment alluding to an accident Lula suffered as a young metalworker — a remark apparently taken by many voters as a gratuitous sneer at the working class. In Netanyahu’s fight for political survival, the Israeli leader delivered an apocalyptic message aimed at polarizing the electorate to his advantage.
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