Saudi airstrikes hit a passenger vehicle in Yemen’s southwestern Taiz province on Thursday, killing at least two civilians and wounding six others, as civilian casualties continue to mount in the US-supported bombing campaign. According to the Yemeni Health Ministry within the Ansar Allah-led government, a pregnant woman also lost her baby due to the strike, […]
As we sprint full-speed into pumpkin patch season, we're taking a look at the Colorado Pumpkin Patch in Monument which offers 20 acres of autumn-themed activities for families to enjoy.
News5 reporter Jon McMichael has more on what people can expect in the video below:
Activities abound at the Colorado Pumpkin Patch in Monument
The Colorado Pumpkin Patch, owned and operated by the Colorado Kids Ranch, runs from mid-September through the end of October and is open Wednesday through Sunday from 9 a.m. - 5 p.m.; the space offers a wide array of activities, including:
Pumpkin patch (to pick out your pumpkins) Outdoor games Slides Swings Laser tag Enormous jumping pads Farm animal petting area Tractor 'hay-rides' And more
According to Aubrey Chapman, manager of the Colorado Kids Ranch, the organization also operates a program aimed at expanding the financial accessibility of their pumpkin patch offerings.
"We have this program called Johnny Pumpkinseed," Chapman stated, "and it's where we offer special needs kiddos and foster care [children] the opportunity to come in free of charge, and they also get a pumpkin with that."
Families attending alongside children that qualify for the program also receive a steep discount ($8.00) for admission to the pumpkin patch.
Prices vary throughout the season; for all but the last four days of October, the price of admission is $20 for everyone (with $2.00 discounts for active or retired military members, seniors, and first responders) while children ages three-and-under can visit for free.
Additional pumpkin patch opportunities on the north side of Colorado Springs and northern El Paso County are listed below:
Fall Mountain Farm - Located in Monument - Open each Thursday through Sunday - Operating through Oct. 31 Miners' Pumpkin Patch - Located in Northern Colorado Springs - Open each Saturday - Operating through Oct. 31
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In Africa, high-quality seeds can produce improved crops with enhanced nutrition, pest-resistance, and drought tolerance. However, such seeds for maize, vegetables, and cereal crops can be indistinguishable from counterfeit, or “fake” seeds. That’s creating a massive potential for fraud in seed quality that can potentially deprive farmers of access to climate-resilient seeds while putting their harvests and incomes at risk. A group of researchers analyzed the efforts of 50 African countries to combat counterfeit seeds. They found a wide range of penalties for selling them across different governments, and concluded that a significant gap exists between government policy commitments and implementation, largely due to limited capacity. Study lead author Ed Mabaya, a professor of global development at Cornell University in the U.S., told Mongabay, “For most smallholder farmers in Africa, planting happens once a season, often timed to the first rains. A farmer who buys counterfeit seed usually finds out only after planting, when the seed fails to germinate or the crop grows poorly. By then it is usually too late to replant, so the loss is not a slightly smaller harvest but potentially the whole season’s food and income.” That can lead to food insecurity for the individual farmer and local markets more broadly. Counterfeiters can dye or repackage grain and sell it as branded, certified seed, Mabaya said. “The problem arises because certified seed looks exactly like ordinary grain but sells for a much higher price, in some cases several times more for hybrid maize. That price gap…This article was originally published on Mongabay
New research has revealed a dramatic expansion in access to abortion medication following government reforms, with thousands more pharmacies now ordering drugs used to end an unborn human life.
The availability of abortion medication across Australia has increased substantially following regulatory changes introduced in 2023, according to new research published in JAMA Network Open.
The study, published on 7 October, found that the number of Australian pharmacies ordering MS-2 Step, a medication used to terminate pregnancies up to nine weeks’ gestation, increased from 2,228 in the two years before the reforms to 4,107 in the two years following them.
Researchers estimated that by July 2025, the number of pharmacies ordering the medication each month was 48.6% higher than would have been expected without the regulatory changes.
The number of Australian postcodes containing at least one pharmacy ordering the medication also increased from 915 to 1,292.
The increase followed a Therapeutic Goods Administration decision to remove additional certification requirements for prescribers and registration requirements for dispensing pharmacists.
The changes, which took effect on 1 August 2023, made abortion medication more accessible through ordinary pharmacies.
While the study confirms a substantial expansion in pharmacy distribution, it does not establish whether the reforms increased the total number of abortions performed.
The findings do, however, raise concerns about the growing normalisation of abortion as a natural form of birth control, despite its fundamental distinction from contraception, that is, the intentional ending of an unborn human life.
Beyond the fatal consequences for the child, the increasing ease of access risks encouraging women to make an irreversible decision without fully considering its moral implications or psychological consequences.
On September 20, 2026, Die Linke achieved a historic result. With 25.7% of the vote, the party became the largest in the Berlin parliament for the first time. The traditional parties of power (the CDU, the SPD, and the Greens) are left standing. A left-wing government with Elif Eralp as governing mayor is, in theory, within reach.
The reason for this success is no mystery. It is substance. During the campaign, thousands of Die Linke volunteers went out into the neighborhoods. Door to door. Building to building. Up one stairwell, down the next. They came not with shiny brochures, but with one fundamental question: what keeps people awake at night?
For hundreds of thousands of Berliners, the answer is painfully clear: rent. The envelope that lands on the doormat every month. The knowledge that an ever-larger share of their wages flows straight into the bank account of some anonymous slumlord.
Die Linke wants to make rents affordable, break the power of listed real estate giants, and finally implement the outcome of the referendum. In that 2021 referendum, more than one million Berliners voted for the socialization of large housing stock.
Berliners consider no other party as competent on housing. The figures speak for themselves: after the election, 37% of all Berliners say Die Linke has the best solutions for affordable housing.
The establishment strikes back: the great reversal of the debate
Die Linke won on material issues: housing, rent, ownership. But within no time, the press and the talk shows have all but stopped talking about any of it. Suddenly the political debate is dominated by accusations of antisemitism. By stories about the Rote Hilfe, a left-wing solidarity organization that provides legal support to activists and prisoners. By alleged connections to criminal “clans.” By the suggestion that parts of the party lie outside the acceptable democratic framework. Suddenly, the burning question in the media is no longer how to lower rents, but whether Die Linke is “even fit to govern at all.”
It is the great reversal of the debate. Center stage no longer belongs to the unaffordable rents, the power of real estate corporations, and the housing crisis, but to the legitimacy of the party that won precisely on those issues. Meanwhile, the federal establishment works hard behind the scenes to make any possible socialization of real estate giants, the so-called Vergesellschaftung, legally impossible. Yet Article 15 of the German Constitution makes such socialization possible in principle.
What we see here is an organized counterattack from established economic and political power blocs. They open multiple fronts simultaneously – economic, legal, political, and ideological. Let us take a closer look at the nine forces that have now mobilized against Die Linke in Berlin.
1. Real estate capital
The most direct clash is with real estate capital. Die Linke wants to expropriate profit-driven housing companies that own more than three thousand units each. That concerns a total of over 200,000 housing units in the city. Among them is Europe’s largest real estate company Vonovia, which alone owns 138,000 units in Berlin.
On September 21, the morning after the election, BFW Berlin-Brandenburg, the lobby club of private project developers, pulls the emergency brake. The real estate group warns of “a step backward in housing policy.” Expropriation would slow new construction. Private capital would flee. The BBU, the association of housing companies in Berlin-Brandenburg, also springs into action. In Handelsblatt, Welt, Die Zeit, and Tagesspiegel it warns of “massive investment risks.” In short, as soon as its property and profit model is even slightly threatened, the real estate lobby pulls out all the stops and lets the organ roar.
Here you see class struggle in its most material form. Die Linke wants to shift power from large real estate owners to tenants and public ownership. The real estate sector wants to preserve the existing regime of private property, rental income, and investment returns.
What is at stake is concrete: who owns the apartments, who controls rental income, where does public money go, and who may decide politically about it?
2. Financial capital
Where there is real estate, there are banks. On that same September 21, Die Deutsche Kreditwirtschaft, the powerful umbrella organization of the German banking sector, issues an official warning. Socialization of housing would deter private capital. It would make real estate financing more difficult. It would drive risk premiums sky-high. It would – for hypocrisy knows no bounds – “reduce funds for education and social policy,” as if the German banking sector had ever been guided by such concerns in past decades.
Financial markets also react immediately. Vonovia’s stock price takes a hit and falls 1.7% against the trend, to its lowest level since June 2023. Deutsche Wohnen takes a beating too. Why? Because for these guys, housing in Berlin are not places where people live, love, and raise children. For big capital, housing units are investment vehicles and collateral for gigantic mountains of debt. If you remove those homes from the private market, you hit not only the slumlord but also the wealth manager, the banker, and the speculator behind the entire parasitic ecosystem of Frankfurt. That too is class struggle.
3. The Berlin business establishment
Traditional Berlin capital had already dug in before the election. The four major employer organizations – the Chamber of Commerce (IHK Berlin), the Handwerkskammer, the VBKI, and the UVB – closed ranks in their so-called Wahlarena der Berliner Wirtschaft, a joint election forum where the main parties had to defend their economic programs before organized Berlin business.
Their lobbying does not stop on election day. After Die Linke’s victory, VBKI chairman Harald Christ mounts his warhorse. His message? “Anyone who wants to expropriate private property in this city puts our future at stake.” The VBKI is one of the most elite clubs of Berlin businessmen, of the sort that lives more on returns from property and the labour of others than on their own labour. According to Harald Christ, who himself holds no elected public mandate, a party “that does not clearly distance itself from antisemitism” should not govern either.
Here you see how the two lines of attack of the establishment merge perfectly. On one hand, defence of sacred private property. On the other, moral blackmail. Die Linke must be treated as a pariah as long as it does not jump through all the hoops of the establishment.
4. The arms industry
A second economic front is the arms industry. For the militarists, Berlin must become a hub in the arms industry. Die Linke sees it differently. The party wants no expansion of military industry in the city, no military propaganda on the streets, and no army recruiters in schools.
That is blasphemy in the church of German militarism. In its hunger for new billion-dollar contracts, the German military-industrial complex of Berlin-Brandenburg wants to create a cluster for defence and aviation. Martina Klement, Minister of Economic Affairs in Brandenburg, already threatened that her state would “continue alone if necessary” if the Berlin government blocked its plans. She points an accusing finger at Die Linke’s critical attitude towards the Rüstungsindustrie, the arms industry. That too is class struggle: will Berlin become a cog in the booming war economy, or will the city build a dam against it?
5. The federal state and the institutional veto
Pressure on Die Linke comes not only from banks, real estate groups, and lobbies. Parts of the state apparatus are also intervening directly into the conflict.
The decision that Die Linke must under no circumstances lead the formation of a Berlin government seems to have been decided even before the polling stations closed on September 20. A few minutes after 6 pm, with the polls barely closed, Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a speech with one clear message: he continues his course, whatever the election result.
A day later, Merz announced he wants to fast-track with a federal law against the socialization of large real estate companies. His coalition had previously made agreements about this, but after Die Linke’s victory it suddenly became urgent. Germany, according to Merz, had to make it clear to international investors that private property remains safe and is not simply expropriated. That it is Merz, of all people, who brings this message is not without meaning. Before his return to politics, he chaired the supervisory board of the German branch of asset manager BlackRock from 2016 to 2020, one of the largest financial players in the world.
What is at stake is Article 15 of the German Constitution.Since 1949, it has explicitly stated that land, natural resources, and means of production can be transferred to common ownership or other forms of communal economy by law, provided compensation is regulated by law. That provision has never been applied. The struggle in Berlin is precisely about whether it can be used for the first time against large real estate companies.
Other statesmen also do not hold back. For example, Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder (CSU) threatens to question financial transfers to Berlin if the city pursues too leftward a course. Bavaria is one of the richest states and a major net contributor to Germany’s system of redistribution. Bavaria is rich, Bavaria pays. And so Söder wants to dictate what Berlin votes. A dangerous Lega-Nord-ization of German federalism: the rich region buying off democracy in the poorer region.
Individual ministers also intervene via their official function. Federal Minister of Economic Affairs Katherina Reiche used her ministry’s Instagram account to attack Die Linke over expropriations, antisemitism, and alleged ties to organized crime. Die Linke has taken legal action against this, invoking the duty of neutrality that binds state institutions.
Even the judiciary has been drawn into the debate. Berlin Attorney General Margarete Koppers warned, amidst the controversy over alleged ‘clan’ contacts around Die Linke, that criminal networks deliberately seek out politicians. She did not accuse Die Linke directly, but her intervention gave additional institutional weight to the image built around the election winner.
Merz and his Vice Chancellor and Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil (SPD) know well what is at stake: if socialization of large real estate companies succeeds in Berlin, it could also raise expectations elsewhere – in the automotive industry, energy sector, or other strategic sectors.
It is precisely this precedent that must be stopped. An electoral victory for Die Linke must under no circumstances grow into an infringement of the existing order of property, let alone into an example that sparks other social struggles.
6. The police and security apparatus
A sixth pressure line comes from the police apparatus. After the election, certain police unions in Berlin warned that a government led by Die Linke could weaken the police by restricting its powers, its surveillance, and its capacity for repression. The Gewerkschaft der Polizei (GdP) went further and warned SPD and Greens that “the security of this city is at stake.” It also suggested officers might leave Berlin to work in other German states.
That threat quickly gained a practical dimension. CDU-led governments in Baden-Württemberg and Brandenburg openly invited Berlin police officers to transfer and explicitly linked that recruitment campaign to the prospect of a government led by Die Linke.
That is organized pressure and blackmail from certain police unions and conservative state governments: accept our vision of police and security, or we will drain your force dry.
7. The Israeli Embassy
And then there is the elephant in the room: the campaign around antisemitism. On September 26, ARD, the major German public broadcasting corporation, found that the controversy over antisemitism had by then “overshadowed all other topics since the election victory.”
Ambassadors are normally not supposed to interfere directly in the host country’s domestic political decision-making. That did not prevent Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor from warning after Die Linke’s victory of an “immediate existential threat” to Jewish life in Berlin. Prosor, a Netanyahu loyalist and critic of the International Criminal Court, accuses parts of Die Linke of “unrestrained antisemitism” and hostility toward Israel.
Virtually simultaneously, Josef Schuster, Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, addressed the SPD and the Greens directly: anyone who helps Die Linke into the Rote Rathaus, the Berlin City Hall, is, in his view, putting social cohesion and Jewish life at risk.
Within the SPD and the Greens, that Israeli pressure finds a willing ear. SPD politician Martin Hikel calls cooperation impossible with a party that, in his words, “tolerates antisemitic statements.” Antisemitism and the defence of Israel have now become central topics in initial talks between Die Linke, the SPD, and the Greens. In this way, the Israeli intervention weighs directly on the political climate in which a new Berlin government is being negotiated.
Behind that lies a broader strategic entanglement. Despite the genocide in Gaza, Germany and Israel continue expanding their military-industrial cooperation. Israeli arms producer Elbit Systems signed new strategic cooperation agreements this year with companies including TKMS and Diehl Defence, among other things for naval weapons systems and drones for the Bundeswehr. Elbit wants to build up to eight new facilities in Germany over the coming years.
That makes the struggle over Israel material as well. It’s not just about Gaza, apartheid, and Israeli settler colonialism, but also about increasingly close military and industrial interconnection. In such a context, the label “antisemitism” takes on particularly political charge when used against forces opposing the Israeli government, German rearmament, or that growing military-industrial cooperation.
8. ELNET: the international lobby network
Beyond the Israeli embassy lies a much broader lobby infrastructure. What stands out is how the theme of antisemitism repeatedly comes to centre stage whenever a consistent left force achieves electoral breakthroughs.
In Great Britain, three major newspapers declared jointly in 2018 that a government under Jeremy Corbyn would constitute an “existential threat” to Jewish life. Corbyn had to be politically delegitimized because he broke with the consensus on Israel, openly supported the Palestinian cause, and simultaneously defended a socio-economic program that collided head-on with British establishment. The accusation of antisemitism thus became a weapon in a broader struggle to declare him unfit for governmental power.
The same pattern surfaced in France. In 2024, Yonathan Arfi, chairman of the umbrella organization of Jewish institutions in France (CRIF), declared that “La France Insoumise (LFI) has no place in government.” Again the accusation was: “antisemitism.” In reality, it was about left criticism of the genocide in Gaza. For recent French municipal elections, French security service Viginum exposed a massive Israeli disinformation campaign run by the shadowy Blackcore. With fake sites, false profiles, fake news, and AI bots, LFI candidates were systematically smeared.
In Berlin, attention focuses mainly on ELNET Deutschland, a lobby organization that seeks to strengthen Israeli-European ties. The money for this little party comes mainly from the US. The German office received over one million euros from ELNET US in a single year.
ELNET financed trips to Israel for at least 51 Bundestag members and brought six IDF officers to the capital for talks with politicians, the Bundeswehr, and media shortly before the Berlin election. Thus ELNET forms an important link between Israeli security circles and the German political establishment, and possesses considerable financial resources and direct access to decision-makers. In the current Berlin debate, that infrastructure strengthens a political climate in which attitude toward Israel increasingly serves as a touchstone for the question who may and may not govern.
9. The United States
Finally, there is American interference. The United States has made no secret in its official National Security Strategy that it actively supports far-right and nationalist forces in Europe – such as the Rassemblement National in France or the AfD in Germany. For Trump, such Europe offers a double advantage: allies who stand closer to Washington, but simultaneously an EU that remains internally divided and less able to act as an independent international power.
American heavyweights like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and former ambassador Richard Grenell have intervened openly in German politics in recent years, typically in ways giving AfD more legitimacy and political space. When AfD scored in Saxony-Anhalt, Trump, Musk, and Grenell were in the front row to cheer. Trump publicly celebrated the result, Musk wrote “Gut gemacht!” (Well done!), and Grenell spoke of “a great victory and a new day in Germany.” That was barely two weeks before the Berlin election.
Meanwhile, the American embassy in Germany set aside approximately $400,000 this summer for German civil society organizations, among other things for projects around “countering antisemitism.” They use diplomatic funds to determine domestic political agendas. On Washington’s instructions, American embassies in Europe feed the witch hunt against the left, while helping the far right into the saddle.
A desperate move
Add all these forces together (banks, real estate companies, employers, arms industry, judiciary, federal government, embassies, and international capital) and you see what really happens in Berlin: different factions of the ruling class defend their own interests but find each other as soon as existing property and power relations are touched.
The first front is material. Real estate capital defends its rents and land ownership, banks their credits and collateral, investors their returns, the arms industry its billion-dollar contracts and state orders. Their interests differ, but on one point they converge: Die Linke must not undermine the grip of private capital on housing, investments, and public funds.
The second front is political and ideological. As soon as those material interests come under pressure, the debate shifts to antisemitism, extremism, Rote Hilfe, and alleged clan connections. The goal then is no longer only to block concrete reforms. Die Linke itself must be pushed outside the boundaries of the politically acceptable.
But let’s be honest: that smear campaign is nothing but a desperate move. The elites play dirty because they lack arguments. No one can look Berliners in the face and claim €1,500 per month for a shack is a good thing. The housing crisis is not an extreme position, but daily reality for the absolute majority of the population, including many voters of the SPD, the Greens, or the right.
Because the establishment cannot win that debate, it tries to impose another one. The smoke bombs go off one after another: “antisemitism!” “clans!” “Islamists!” “Rote Hilfe!” The less of an answer there is to the social question, the louder the noise about Die Linke’s supposed unfitness to govern at all.
The real extremism in this world is not a party that organizes tenants. The real extremism is a society in which millions of people are driven out of their city because a handful of vultures demand their returns. The real extremism is a system that reduces housing to speculation and war to a profit model.
Die Linke won on the fundamental question: whose city is Berlin? Who sets the rules, who controls the bricks, and whom should the city serve? The answer from Berliners was clear. The intensity of the counterattack shows how well the other side understands what is at stake.
Nobody should fear that polarization. It is simply the noise of class struggle: economic powers defending their property and capital, state powers trying to guard the boundaries within which an election result may change something. The scent of panic hangs in the corridors of power. There is no reason to turn defensive or to retreat. There is all the more reason to rely on the people and to mobilize. Because in the end, that is where the decisive question lies: who truly forms the majority in Berlin, and who holds the power to stand in its way?
Peter Mertensis a writer and the Secretary General of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB/PDVA).
Yemen’s Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, has launched multiple attacks on airports in Saudi Arabia in recent days, marking an escalation of the conflict, which was reignited by Saudi airstrikes on the Sanaa International Airport back in July. The ramped-up Ansar Allah strikes on airports came after the group warned on October 5 […]
NPR Music culture critic and reporter Rodney Carmichael ruminates on the latest in rap culture. This week: an unbothered, radically different, equal but opposite response to rap's podcast bros.
Spanish trade unions representing millions of workers have announced a general strike for November 11. The announcement comes amid nationwide mobilizations for the right to housing and only days after Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called early elections for November 29.
The strike was announced by the two largest union organizations, the General Union of Workers (UGT) and the Workers’ Commissions (Comisiones Obreras, CCOO), alongside the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), Basque unions ELA and LAB, and the Galician confederation CIG.
It will be the country’s first general strike in 14 years, excluding the feminist strike of March 8, 2018.
Housing and wages are the same struggle
“A key demand of this strike is to vindicate decent salaries to afford housing,” the Madrid Tenants Union wrote.
In their strike call, unions emphasized several demands that have been on their agenda for months. These include reductions in working hours, wage increases, health and safety measures in the workplace, eradicating precarious employment and progress in collective bargaining – a process that has been obstructed by employers for almost a year.
Yet, echoing the sentiment voiced on the streets, where hundreds of thousands have protested and erected encampments against a predatory housing system, the trade union call links all these demands to the right to housing.
“This is a strike with very clear foundations and labor demands,” CCOO’s Carlos Gutiérrez said. “Is it being called because working families cannot access affordable housing? Yes. But we cannot separate the inability to access affordable housing from the wage situation in our country and what is happening in the workplace.”
Maricarmen Abascal during a protest in June 2026. Source Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid/Facebook
The general strike builds on a protest wave triggered by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal in late September. After years of battle to keep the home she had been living in for 70 years, Abascal was carried out of the apartment on a stretcher. She remained hospitalized until Wednesday, October 7, when the Madrid Tenants Union announced her death.
“Although a historic agreement was reached that would have allowed her to return to her home, this solution came too late,” the organization wrote. “An absolutely avoidable situation, following an agonizing process.”
A strike against all who “do nothing to solve the housing crisis”
Many of those participating in the protests recognized that Sánchez’s administration failed to implement policies that would truly address the housing crisis. Yet union and civil society statements emphasize the problem goes much further than the behavior of a specific political option.
“It’s important to make clear that this is not a strike against any particular government, but against those who do nothing to solve the housing crisis, and also against the employers, who have kept the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC) blocked for nearly a year,” Patricia Ruiz from UGT was quoted as saying in Público.
Political parties from the center-left to the left have largely expressed support for the strike. Even PSOE figures who share the responsibility for not addressing the housing crisis signaled support for concerns outlined by trade unions.
While a general strike held only a couple of weeks ahead of an election would usually spell trouble for the incumbent administration, local political analysts say this is a peculiar situation that could swing both ways.
Right-wing options are polling high, but ongoing housing mobilizations could steer the electoral campaign away from scapegoating migrants toward issues of social justice – topics they are generally keen to avoid.
Brazil’s general election on October 4 delivered a severe warning to the left. Flávio Bolsonaro, the presidential candidate of the Liberal Party (PL), finished ahead of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with approximately 47% against 45%. Neither secured a majority, sending them into a runoff on October 25. More troubling than this narrow presidential gap was the advance of bolsonarismo through Congress. The election has strengthened a political movement whose ambitions extend beyond defeating Lula to reshaping the institutions that obstruct its exercise of power.
The imprisonment (house arrest) and electoral exclusion of Jair Bolsonaro have not dissolved his movement. His son Flávio carries its presidential banner, while other members of the family have won seats in Congress. Michelle Bolsonaro, Jair’s wife, and Carlos Bolsonaro, his son, enter the Senate; Jair Renan, another son, and Renato, Jair’s brother, enter the Chamber of Deputies. Nepobolsonarismo is an appropriate name for this family’s expansion through the state. Yet the family is only the most visible expression of a broader project, rooted in powerful economic interests and a deeply organized reactionary politics.
A presidential contest with continental stakes
Lula remains the principal obstacle to the return of this project to the presidency. His defeat would affect workers and peasants throughout Brazil, but also the possibilities for regional cooperation and an independent Latin American foreign policy. Brazil’s size, industrial capacity, raw minerals (such as critical minerals), agricultural resources, and diplomatic reach give its political direction continental significance. A government that subordinates these assets to Washington’s priorities would weaken the space available to neighboring countries seeking their own paths of development.
The first-round geography demonstrates both Lula’s strength and his difficulties. He retained a commanding position in the Northeast, while Flávio led across the other four regions. São Paulo’s enormous electorate provided a particularly important advantage to the right. These divisions cannot be explained by an opposition between an enlightened population and an ignorant one. They require an examination of the different conditions of work, the organization of political life, and the capacity of competing movements to interpret people’s frustrations.
Lula approaches the runoff with a substantial social record. Unemployment fell to 5.3% in the quarter ending in August, the lowest rate for that period in the statistical series beginning in 2012. Such improvements matter enormously to families for whom a regular wage brings relief from daily uncertainty. But an improved national indicator does not settle the political argument. Employment can coexist with exhausting journeys, expensive housing, inadequate public services, and the insecurity of debt. The distance between statistical improvement and lived experience remains terrain on which the right operates.
Bolsonarismo, or Brazil’s far right of a special type, translates these frustrations into resentment against the left, all public institutions, and vulnerable sections of society. Its promise of order offers an immediate language for fear, while concealing the economic arrangements that produce insecurity. The left cannot answer this merely by advertising government achievements. It must connect those achievements to a credible program for changing everyday life, and explain which interests prevent further advances. A worker struggling with debt needs more than reassurance that the economy is performing well. This has been the problem for Lula, whose program for the future does not seem to promise more than what has been delivered till now.
The senate: a struggle over institutional power
The Senate election is particularly consequential because 54 of its 81 seats were contested. Senators serve eight-year terms, so the results will shape national politics well beyond the next presidential administration. The PL won 19 seats and will hold 28 in the new Senate, making it the largest party. The PT will have nine. The bolsonaristas have therefore established a formidable position, although the PL itself remains short of a majority and must bargain with other parties.
Michelle Bolsonaro and Bia Kicis took both seats in the Federal District, while Carlos Bolsonaro and Carol de Toni won the two seats in Santa Catarina. These victories show the movement’s ability to organize coordinated campaigns and concentrate support behind its candidates. There were important successes for the left: Rui Costa and Jaques Wagner won in Bahia, Humberto Costa retained representation in Pernambuco, and Marília Campos won in Minas Gerais. These results preserve points of resistance within an increasingly hostile chamber. The Senate’s significance extends beyond ordinary legislation. The bolsonaristas have made their confrontation with the Supreme Federal Court a central political objective, including demands to impeach its ministers. Their strengthened representation increases their capacity to pursue that confrontation and to influence the election of the Senate president. Predictions of an automatic majority for impeachment should be treated cautiously: party affiliation, campaign declarations, and votes in a specific proceeding are different things. Nevertheless, the danger of using legislative power to intimidate the judiciary has plainly grown.
This is part of a struggle over the conditions under which the far right can govern. The judicial proceedings against Jair Bolsonaro did not remove the social forces supporting him. Those forces now seek greater leverage over institutions capable of restraining them. For the left, defending democratic space must therefore accompany the struggle to expand social rights. Workers’ organizations cannot afford to lose the freedoms through which they organize, educate, and confront capital.
Federal deputies: the right advances, the left finds openings
All 513 seats in the Chamber of Deputies were up for election this year. The PL secured 121, consolidating its position as the largest party in this chamber as well as in the Senate. The federation of the Workers’ Party, Communist Party of Brazil, and Green Party won 88 seats, with the PT itself taking 70. The federation’s growth is significant, but it leaves Lula’s allies far from a majority. Parties of the right hold 303 seats, while the broader parliamentary left holds 124.
The outcome strengthens the far right of a special type within a legislature already dominated by conservative interests. It also weakens some established brokers of parliamentary power, such as the centrão, the collection of parties that trades legislative support for influence over appointments and public resources, although it remains indispensable for majority building. What bargaining will take place within the centrão will now take place alongside a larger and more assertive PL. If Lula wins in the second round, he will confront substantial congressional resistance, but if Flávio wins, the same Congress could facilitate a reactionary program.
Yet the election also brought important representatives of a fighting Left into the Chamber. Jones Manoel, the communist historian elected through PSOL in Pernambuco, received 249,077 votes and finished first in Recife. Elias Jabbour, the communist geographer, was elected for the PCdoB in Rio de Janeiro. Their victories suggest an audience for political education and socialist arguments, even amid the right’s advance. They offer resources for rebuilding confidence among people who have grown impatient with the narrowing ambitions of parliamentary politics. Jones Manoel has already offered to assist Lula’s runoff campaign, including its digital communication, while proposing stronger attention to demands such as free public transport. This is a useful example of political clarity: criticism of the government’s limitations can coexist with active mobilization against the far right of a special type. Such unity does not require workers to abandon their demands. It becomes stronger when those demands supply the campaign’s energy and direction.
The task before October 25
The runoff cannot be won through negotiations among party leaders alone. It requires organized activity in workplaces, neighborhoods, universities, and rural communities, with a program people can recognize in their own lives. Transport, wages, housing, debt, public healthcare, and the time consumed by work must become the substance of a democratic campaign. Defense of sovereignty becomes tangible when it is connected to the ability to use Brazil’s wealth for the needs of its people.
The angry tide has advanced, but it has not carried away the millions who still seek another Brazil. The new communist deputies, the surviving mass organizations (especially the landless workers of the MST), and Lula’s enormous electoral base provide foundations for resistance. The immediate task is to defeat Flávio Bolsonaro. The longer task is to build a popular power strong enough to prevent the oligarchy from deciding, election after election, how little change the majority will be allowed.
Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and How the International Monetary Fund Suffocates Africa, written with Grieve Chelwa. He is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).
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Anne Carson, who won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature today, doesn’t write masterpieces or door-stoppers, and she has no interest in emulating the great works of the past—including those of past laureates. Despite her training as a classicist and her celebrated skill as a translator, she would likely have little to say about the authenticity of film adaptations of The Odyssey. Carson is a poet by trade, but she’s really an archaeologist of sorts, sifting through the pottery shards of culture and letting the light of our own time illuminate their beauty.
Carson prefers to use fragments as seeds for her own poetry, and the high-cultural touchpoints for her lyrics and critical essays—Sappho, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Michelangelo Antonioni, Simone Weil—sometimes give her work an air of forbidding experimentation that quickly turns, upon reading, into pleasure and delight. You may not know or care who Heloïse and Abelard are, but I can promise that you will enjoy reading them argue in a hotel room in the middle of her 2005 “spoken-word opera,” Decreation.
Across roughly two dozen translations and original books, a twee-punk “don’t give a damn” attitude pervades Carson’s reinterpretation of ancient texts: Her poetry shuns obeisance to tradition and literality and embraces creative fantasy instead. For that reason, the barrier to entry for her poetry is surprisingly low—surprisingly, I mean, for a poet whose books often contain a page or two of footnotes. Carson wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the ancient poet Sappho at the University of Toronto, in the city where she was born in 1950. When I was a classics major in college, her 1998 re-creation of a bit of obscure Greek mythology, Autobiography of Red, was a cult object. Some of her poetry isn’t even poetry at all, but a mix of essays, screenplays, even the odd oratorio. Nox, her 2010 elegy for her brother—the title is Latin for “night”—arrives in a box and unfolds like an accordion. Carson’s predilection for the classics doesn’t domesticate them; it riffs on how astonishingly strange it can be to put words down on a page (or papyrus) in a meaningful order, and to try to have them capture the human condition.
Sappho, Carson’s early subject, offers an important clue as to why her work matters to us now, and perhaps also as to why she won the Nobel. Sappho’s poetry has survived only in bits and pieces, and her form of writing, as much as her obsession with love and longing, has inspired Carson’s own iconoclastic, restless tacking among genres. Yet Carson is averse to the common assumption that we have to look for what’s directly relatable in the past in order to fall in love with it. In an interview with The Paris Review, she confessed that she finds very little “direct relevance of ancient things to modern things”; instead, she gets “little glimpses of similarity, embedded in unbelievable otherness.”
That strikes me as pretty close to a definition of poetry itself, the art form that may be better than any other at embedding everyday objects (a wheelbarrow, a coffee spoon) within the tantalizing atmosphere of the new. Carson’s poetry connects us to the past for the same reason that it stands out as some of the most accomplished poetry of her generation: Rather than lulling us with history’s familiarity, she seduces us with its strangeness.
In the days leading up to the Nobel Prize announcement, I happened to have been rereading Autobiography of Red for the first time in 24 years. This “novel in verse” takes its prompt from a 6th-century-B.C.E. fragment about a little monster, Geryon, who falls in love with Herakles—before the god kills him. In Carson’s rendering, the two meet as teenagers at a bus station and reunite years later in Buenos Aires. They travel by plane to a volcano in Peru, where Geryon, now an aspiring photographer, takes pictures of the bubbling lava (no one dies). From so fragile, bizarre, and slender a source—we never forget this is a meet-cute between a red, winged monster and a divine hero—Carson conjures a romance in which love feels unbelievably alien and yet utterly recognizable: “Up on the overpass / the night was wide open / and blowing headlights like a sea. He stood against the wind and let it peel him / clean.”
Carson’s playfulness, humor, and curiosity—and, above all, her tenderness—make her poetry a powerful antidote to the chilled and coarsened social world of the present, not to mention the worry that history and the classics will lose their audiences. What I find most moving about her work is her ability to turn abstract thought into concrete feeling, and to make this feeling our own. Who has not wondered, as the young Geryon does, what “distance” looks like? Carson writes, “It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.” When I gaze down a path or a road, when I feel the separation from someone I love, or when I think of the gulf between the present and the past, I somehow know exactly what she means.
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