Brazil, Serbia, Israel: Elections in Revolutionary Times

In this episode of Against the Stream, Victor Murray is joined by Ben Curry of the International Secretariat of the Revolutionary Communist International to look at three elections of the past week.

In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro led the first round, with the markets banking on a win. Then the youth took the campaign out of the hands of the official parties. A million marched in São Paulo, close to two million in Rio, and Lula went from 45 per cent to 52 in the second round. Now, Bolsonaro has fled to Miami.

Many of the young people who came out were not fighting for Lula, but saw the necessity of using the election as a means to strike a blow against the right. On the streets, the hammer and sickles were everywhere. Openly communist Jones Manoel was elected the most-voted federal deputy in Pernambuco, and thousands have applied to join the RCI’s Brazilian section in a matter of weeks.

Similarly in Serbia, the radical mood on the streets were brought into the ballot box, where the student list born out of the mass movement after the Novi Sad canopy collapse won more than half the vote, ending Aleksandar Vučić’s twelve years in power.

In Israel the last week also saw an election, the character of which was the polar opposite. Here the contest was between the far right and the further right, with both sides competing over who could most effectively ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people, exposing the myth of a “liberal” Zionism once and for all.

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📖 Recommended reading 📖 Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ The RCI’s manifesto https://marxist.com/manifesto-of-the-revolutionary-communist-international.htm Financial Times – Lula’s stunning comeback meets fiscal reality https://www.ft.com/content/79785581-88c2-49a9-a109-9d5ccafc3c7d?syn-25a6b1a6=1 Financial Times Serbia’s students should take a leaf out of Magyar’s book https://www.ft.com/content/43f5c6af-5b1f-4995-9263-b7882013cb99 +972 Magazine 50 shades of right: An Israeli election primer https://www.972mag.com/israeli-election-primer-2026-netanyahu-eisenkot/

⏱️ Timestamps ⏱️ 0:00 Introduction 3:55 Brazil 38:17 Serbia 52:08 Israel

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