Early congratulations
Recently: Why does American politics seem to have gotten so nasty? Teresa M. Bejan on the difference between good and bad civility in a democracy. (Open-access, in partnership with the Marlborough House Foundation—see our editor’s note here.)
Today: For one night, Brazil’s top TV network takes its telenovela off the air—a first—and puts the two presidential candidates in its place. … &c.
For members: The weekend despatch is here.
+ New music from Norman Nodge …
Global
Prime time
On Friday night in Rio de Janeiro, TV Globo, Brazil’s biggest network, dropped its main evening soap opera for the first time in its history, to make room for a debate. Three weeks after Globo canceled its last one, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Senator Flávio Bolsonaro both took their places. “Today is October 23, the month isn’t over yet,” Flávio Bolsonaro told viewers. “Has your salary already run out?” Lula accused him of “licking the boots” of U.S. President Donald Trump, who’s put tariffs on Brazil. Flávio Bolsonaro’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, is serving 27 years for plotting a coup. A Datafolha poll on Thursday had the two tied, 50–50. … See “Dead air in Rio.”
‘Hell to pay’
On Friday, four ambassadors in Brasília told Reuters that foreign missions are discussing how fast they can recognize Sunday’s winner, once Brazil’s electoral court confirms one. Why the rush? Two of them worry that Trump might question the result if Lula wins narrowly. It “wouldn’t surprise me,” one said, if Trump or Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, declared Flávio Bolsonaro the winner before Brazil’s authorities did. In Honduras last December, with the count slow and his candidate narrowly ahead, Trump posted, “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” Asked whether Trump would accept the court’s result, the U.S. State Department didn’t answer.
Second terms
Here in The Signal, Oliver Stuenkel looked at Jair Bolsonaro’s chances of reelection, a year before he lost to Lula. Since Brazil’s return to democracy, Stuenkel says, every president who’d run again had won, partly because a president can steer public money to voters. Jair Bolsonaro, he says, had other options in his “war chest”: “fake news, threatening that if he loses, he may not accept the result—which he is doing on a daily basis.” In 2022, he became the first Brazilian president to lose a reelection bid. This time, the incumbent is Lula. Now Stuenkel says that a Trump refusal to recognize a Lula win quickly is “a scenario that one has to keep on the radar.” … See “We’re all Brazilians now.”
‘Without civil strife’
Early on April 2, 1964, two days after army units moved against President João Goulart, the president of Brazil’s Senate, Auro de Moura Andrade, declared the presidency vacant. Goulart was still in the country, in Porto Alegre. At 3:45 a.m., the speaker of the lower house, Ranieri Mazzilli, took the oath at the presidential palace in Brasília. That evening, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson sent Mazzilli his “warmest good wishes on your installation as President of the United States of Brazil.” Americans, he wrote, admired Brazil’s resolve to settle its difficulties “within a framework of constitutional democracy and without civil strife.” Goulart left for exile in Uruguay on April 4—and the generals ran Brazil for the next 21 years.
Meanwhile
Two Palestinian gunmen kill two Israeli soldiers near Hebron, in the West Bank, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders the city sealed, four days before Israelis vote. … The BBC finds that Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces attacked health facilities in El Fasher, in Darfur, at least 43 times before taking the city last year (see “The vanishing of El Fasher”). … The European Parliament gives its human-rights award, the Sakharov Prize, to the International Criminal Court (see “‘Accumulated evil’”). … The International Union for Conservation of Nature puts 96 percent of shallow-water coral reefs at high risk of collapse within 50 years. … & Archaeologists at Troy find a bone flute from the eighth century B.C., the site’s first in 160 years of digging.
Thoughts? concierge@thesgnl.com.
Can’t hear yourself think?
The David Lynch Foundation helps bring calm to veterans, students, and communities in need.
The weekend despatch
The kingdom and the machine
Eyes only
- The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation says an engineer hid a recorder in the conference room where his bosses meet government officials—and now his own government wants to pay whatever it takes to get him out of jail. Why?
In the air
- What’s happening on the streets of Paris, Milan, and Tirana? Standpoints from Plamen Monowski, Michele Serra, and Noah Smith.
From the files
- Is Iran behind the Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia? Alex Vatanka on why the Islamic Republic’s allies don’t always do as they’re told.
Features
- Why does American politics seem to have gotten so nasty? Teresa M. Bejan on the difference between good and bad civility in a democracy.
Books
- Why is invading another country such a hard thing to prosecute? Lawrence Douglas, The Criminal State: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice.
Music
- What’s a lawyer doing in the DJ booth at Berlin’s Berghain?
- & New tracks from Norman Nodge, Josh Johnson, The Nightclubs, Rustie, & Orbital.
+ Weather report
- Two forecasts agree on where India’s next cyclone lands—but not on what happens when it gets there …
Strengthen The Signal.
Become a member, keep your bearings, navigate your world.
Music
‘NN-Dub 5.5’
Norman Nodge has been a resident DJ at Berghain, the Berlin techno club in a former power plant, since 2005, and this is his first new track in three years. He plays there about once a month, and the rest of the time, he practices law.
What’s a lawyer doing at Berghain?
