In a historic turn of electoral tides, Brazil’s incumbent president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva defeated far-right opponent Flávio Bolsonaro on Sunday (25 October,) alleviating fears that a Bolsonaro-dynasty comeback would topple the world’s fourth-largest democracy. 

Following a disastrous first-round election for Lula on 4 October, in which he narrowly lost a majority in Brazil’s national congress, the Workers’ party leader overturned predictions to become the first president to win the second round of voting after losing the first one.

First-round voting gave 47 percent for former president Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Flávio, and his rightwing Liberal Party, whose voters mainly represent wealthy and emerging middle classes in the south of Brazil, as well as evangelical Christians, one of the largest religious groups in the country. 

Lula’s northeastern, working class, multi-racial support base only made up 45 percent of all primary votes, but climted to 51.8 percent in Sunday’s second-round of the presidential election. 

Despite setting a record in being the first Brazilian president to win four non-consecutive terms, Lula’s triumph still leaves room for possible conflict. 

Bolsonaro, whose campaign capitalised on continuing the work of his divisive father, who is currently serving a 27-year prison sentence for plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election, refused to concede defeat – leaving an open window for history to repeat itself. 

“We’ll request the annulment of these elections,” Bolsonaro told the press after votes had been counted, accusing Brazil’s Supreme Court of having “changed the rules of the game in the middle of the game,” by ordering polls to stay open for two more hours on Sunday.

What Brazil’s nationalist candidate declared as “unacceptable” was an idea initially intended to facilitate all Brazilians’ attendance at the polls, since multiple areas were reported to have been affected by public transport problems. 

Bolsonaro’s issue with the courts is another link in the chain of power-hungry promises he had made during his campaign to “re-democratise this country”.

Without guidance on what that could mean beyond his publicised desire to extend the duration of presidential terms, many voters fearfully associated his remarks with a potential coup, or with Jair Bolsonaro’s infamous liking for authoritarian rulers – including Brazil’s own 1964-1985 dictatorship.

‘Lula’s army’

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Israel’s election on Tuesday (27 October) could bring a new government without changing the country’s course. Having worked as a parliamentary adviser in the Knesset and later as executive director of Peace Now, I know how that can happen.

Many of the parties seeking to replace Benjamin Netanyahu are avoiding clear positions on the Israeli-Palestinian question, but some of their candidates may end up overseeing annexation they never campaigned for.

Israel’s previous coalition, led by Naftali Bennett in 2021, offers a warning.

Called the “government of change” because it ended Netanyahu’s 12-year run in office, it brought together a variety of parties, from Bennett’s rightwing party to Labor and Meretz, leftwing parties.

Its answer to profound ideological disagreements, particularly over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was to preserve the status quo. The coalition lasted roughly 18 months, and although it changed the tone of government, it left much of the policy towards the West Bank intact.

For example, Merav Michaeli, then Labor leader and transport minister, opposed settlement expansion.

Yet her ministry continued to implement previously approved infrastructure commitments, including substantial budgets for roads facilitating that expansion.

Through my work at Peace Now, I saw how the coalition’s status-quo agreement constrained her ability to challenge projects inherited from the previous government. A minister could thus find herself implementing a vision she opposed.

Today, the stakes are higher.

Another slice of the West Bank

Consider E1, between Jerusalem and the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim, where construction would threaten Palestinian territorial contiguity and the viability of a future Palestinian state.

The government has advanced tenders for all 3,401 planned housing units, with crucial stages of the tender process set to be completed before a new government takes office.

E1 exemplifies wider efforts to establish difficult-to-reverse facts: new settlement outposts, including in areas under Palestinian civil administration, expanding settlements and administrative changes that entrench Israeli control.

A successor government would have to intervene actively to reverse them.

These developments are backed by an explicit political vision. The current government’s guidelines and coalition agreements assert exclusive Jewish rights throughout the land of Israel and commit to advancing Israeli sovereignty in the West Bank.

Under Bezalel Smotrich, serving as a minister within the defence ministry, a new settlement administration and civilian positions have been established, shifting significant aspects of West Bank governance from military administration to civilian political control.

These structures will not disappear when their architects leave office. The far-right has equipped the state with both a vision and the machinery to advance it.

Inertia is not neutral when the machinery is already moving in one direction.

Parties seeking to replace Netanyahu need not necessarily agree on a final-status agreement with the Palestinians, but they must find enough common ground to commit to halting annexation and reversing the structures that enable it.

Those understandings belong in coalition negotiations, when parties still have leverage, rather than in battles left for individual ministers once they are in office.

Nor is this a distant constitutional question. Palestinians in the West Bank already face systematic violations of their basic rights and freedoms, from restrictions on movement and access to land to violence and forced displacement. Each new settlement and outpost deepens this injustice and makes the prospect of a political settlement more remote.

Facts on ground

The entrenchment of permanent Israeli control is creating a reality that is increasingly difficult to reverse, making political intervention more urgent with every passing year.

The current government’s response to growing international pressure illustrates the danger.

After the UK announced measures targeting settlements, foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar ordered the closure of its consulate in East Jerusalem. Britain considered expelling Israeli diplomats in response, and a compromise left a much smaller British mission operating.

The episode illustrates Netanyahu’s vision of a ‘Super Sparta’: an Israel preparing itself for international isolation rather than addressing the policies contributing to it.

A future government seeking to change that trajectory should start with two tasks.

‘Messianic minority’

First, it must take seriously the reasons behind international sanctions and address the policies driving them, including settlement expansion and settler violence. A messianic minority must not be allowed to drag Israel into international isolation and economic decline.

Second, the government should help European partners distinguish between Israel and the settlements, including through transparent supply chains and clear proof of origin, so that restrictions aimed at settlements do not spill over into the broader Israeli economy.

Both tasks require urgent and concrete policy changes, beyond a more moderate diplomatic tone.

European governments should not expect a new coalition, or even international sanctions themselves, to bring about these changes automatically. They need to make their expectations explicit, press prospective coalition partners to incorporate concrete commitments into their agreements, and judge the resulting government by its actions.

Without that pressure, politicians who never endorsed annexation may become useful idiots for a project they do not support, helping to consolidate a single undemocratic state in which millions of Palestinians are permanently denied equal rights and freedoms.

Preventing that outcome requires urgent political action, while a different future is still possible. Neither Israelis seeking change nor their European partners can afford to assume it will happen on its own.

The Ukraine battlefield is the hottest part of Russia’s war on the West, but not the only one. The Kremlin is betting that sabotage, intimidation and other sub-threshold attacks will make Ukraine’s allies so distracted, scared and tired that they cut their support to Kyiv. Meanwhile Russia’s political warfare is reaping rewards in Africa, Asia and Latin America. 

The widening fronts in this global conflict are ably depicted in a new book, We Shall Outlast Them: Putin’s Global Campaign to Defeat the West by Hanna Notte.

The Berlin-based, Oxbridge-educated Russia expert unpicks Kremlin influence operations in a dozen-plus countries. Her reporting is meticulous, the descriptions vivid, and the conclusion bleak: Russia is using the West’s own weakness to beat us. 

One paradox is globalisation: the West’s main project since the collapse of communism, but which now undermines its sanctions efforts.

‘Eurasian roundabout’

China, North Korea, Iran and other countries in what Notte calls the “Eurasian roundabout” help Russia export and import what it needs to keep its war machine running.

Hard-headed shipping magnates in Dubai will not stop dealing with the “shadow fleet”, any more than Indian energy tycoons will shun cheap oil. It’s just business, they tell her. 

But not only that.

Many in the mis-named “Global South” instinctively despise Ukraine as an American proxy. The irony is head-spinning: Ukraine is treated as a pariah for its ties to a supposed patron that has now all but abandoned it.

As well as exploiting anti-Americanism (whatever that means these days) Russia also draws on deep historical sympathies that are all but incomprehensible seen from the former captive nations of Europe. 

Many influential Africans, for example, have bitter first-hand or inherited memories of US treatment of their continent in the Cold War, including support for apartheid-era South Africa.

They also have a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union, which supported their liberation struggle. Some studied there. That Ukraine is the victim of a revanchist imperialist Russia makes no sense to them; interviewed by Notte, they struggle to see it as a real country.

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The US and Israeli-led war with Iran, launched in late February, and other military campaigns in the region have disrupted flights, leaving around 5,500 deportations that would normally receive support from the EU’s border agency Frontex unexecuted.

The disruption comes despite the Warsaw-based agency’s recent announcement that returns rose in the first half of 2026, with Syrians and Iraqis among the 10 nationalities most frequently deported.

Internally, however, Frontex appears concerned.

In July, it highlighted return problems because of the Middle East crisis, a broad swathe of conflicts that has seen various airspace closures over Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Israel, Qatar, Syria, and the UAE.

It said roughly 4,000 returns had not been carried out because of direct cancellations or broader operational standstills, with member states halting the organisation or scheduling of Frontex-supported returns due to the Middle East conflicts.

By 30 September, that figure had climbed to 5,500.

Although now open (as of publication), airspace restrictions, route availability and operational measures may be introduced, amended or lifted rapidly, sometimes with little notice.

European deportation setbacks typically involve everything from fragmented national systems, to people absconding, and to foreign states refusing to accept their own nationals. But war and conflict are now adding another layer of complications.

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The peaceful departure of Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić could open a positive new chapter in Western Balkans history, even as France drifts in the opposite direction.

Vučić acknowledged defeat shortly after 9.30PM on Sunday (25 October), when exit polls put his SNS party on 105 seats in parliament out of 250, behind the reformist Student List movement, led by cardiologist Ilija Srdanović, on 135 to 140, even though the final results were far from clear.

“Serbia is free! People, BRAVO!,” the Student List posted on X.

It had been a tense night in Belgrade, with a heavy police presence in front of government buildings, scuffles at polling stations, and with student and other citizens’ patrol groups monitoring voting, as well as over 300 formal international observers.

MEPs and US senators had also warned Vučić (who had once worked at the top levels of the brutal dictatorship of Slobodan Milošević) on X not to resort to violence to try to steal the vote.

But it seems that the landslide was so huge and the turnout so massive (over 69 percent) that there was nothing to be done.

And the popular eruption of joy seen afterward all over Serbia was also reminiscent of the fall of Viktor Orbán in elections in Hungary in April.

Serbian nationalism, Western Balkan corruption, and Russian interference will not disappear from the region overnight, but with the nationalist-populist Vučić gone there is more chance of normalisation of Kosovo relations and less risk of a Bosnia break up.

And there is every chance that a positive reform momentum, rewarded by the EU, could spread from Serbia into neighbouring states and help bring more Western Balkan countries into Europe, after Montenegro is due to join in 2027.

It is the fourth defeat in national elections for pro-Russian and/or far-right parties in Europe this year, after Hungary, but also Sweden and Latvia.

And that is a good trend for progressives, in the run-up to the election super-cycle of late 2026/2027, which will see similar battles unfold in Spain, France, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Slovakia, Poland, and Italy in the next 12 months.

“If we have peace, whatever the outcome, it will be beneficial and blessed. If we have unrest, anger, and hatred, whatever the outcome, it will be disastrous for everyone,” said Serb Orthodox Church patriarch Porfirije earlier on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the spectacle of a peaceful, democratic transition of power in Serbia will not be welcomed by Moscow’s authoritarian rulers.

But if it is an example to Russian people, then it is also a powerful, alternative model for any students, leftwing activists, or ethnic minorities in France, Italy, or further afield in Europe, who spent a second weekend rioting in multiple towns in protest at social inequality.

If the far-right was to take power in France in April, spurred on by racial tension and civil unrest, it would quickly wipe out any gains made on Sunday in Serbia, in terms of EU stability, Western Balkans’ enlargement prospects, and Russian influence in Europe.

But if young people in the EU want fairer societies, then the students of Serbia, who began today’s tectonic shift in small protests two years ago in the provincial town of Novi Sad, have shown them that the path to victory lies in non-violent resistance and patience.

Israel’s 27 October election might disappoint everyone. To start, there may be no next-day resolution. Polls show the Netanyahu-allied and opposition blocs nearly tied, both short of a majority.

If that holds, expect weeks of furtive factional negotiations that diminish the reputations of all involved. If those fail, back to the ballot box.  

If a new government forms quickly, it will likely be led by Benjamin Netanyahu or the opposition’s Gadi Eisenkot. Most observers outside Israel are hoping for Gadi. In truth, either result will confront Brussels and Washington with tough choices that both have put off too long.  

Last week’s grudging and partial White House endorsement notwithstanding, Netanyahu is near-friendless on the international scene.

If he grinds out another win, many European leaders and US presidential contenders will find themselves managing bilateral relationships of mutual  contempt.  

Unwilling to face hard facts at home, Bibi seemed to think he could gamble them away with Gulf money and American missile interceptors. He marketed himself as the founding entrepreneur of a new-model Middle East powered by Saudi normalisation and Iranian regime change.

Instead, Houthi drones and Saudi budget deficits are vaporising the mirage of glass cities and data centres in the desert.  

Trump’s war now

Iran is Trump’s war now, not Israel’s: He will fight or end it as he pleases. What’s left on the IDF’s regional briefing map are small places with complicated pasts and unclear futures, lands that Israel wishes the rest of the  world would forget but is itself unwilling to leave.  

The old Middle East is back. In truth, it never left.

It has been the beggar at the door of every air-conditioned Gulf investment conference. But the poor relations — Gaza,  the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen — have refused to go quietly.  

Israel’s old politics are back, too.

The median Israeli is 29-years old. Netanyahu, whose hair and makeup bills are the subject of a considerable body of investigative journalism, just turned 77. His leading rival Eisenkot, who lost a son and two nephews in Gaza, launched his career as a platoon commander in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.  

Israel, like America, is due generational change.

Instead, Israelis (or at least undecided centre-right voters) got a choice of character: the embarrassing, but reassuringly indestructible Bibi, or the earnest but untested Eisenkot.  

It’s not just the faces that are familiar. The candidates are still fighting Israel’s culture wars. The debates that dominated the election — ultra-orthodox military  enlistment, judicial reform, and the role of religion in the state — are serious. But they’re also stalemated.  

Despite deafening recriminations about who is to blame for exposing Israel to Hamas’s 7 October attacks, the debate about security in Gaza and Israel’s north is equally stuck.  

Indiscriminate destruction and deliberate destabilisation

Netanyahu promised “total victory”; that turned out to mean indiscriminate destruction and deliberate destabilisation. His opponents claim Netanyahu has squandered the IDF’s  achievements. They promise to do what Netanyahu could not, by using the same crude tools to achieve the same poorly defined objectives — but this time, with greater skill.  

The question of what that means for ordinary Palestinian civilians, and what future they can expect for their children, has barely been discussed.

Many Israeli voters, desensitised to the situation of Palestinians who are  routinely dehumanised by Israel’s domestic press, don’t ask. Most Israeli candidates carefully avoid answering.  

Both blocs pledge they’ll refuse to partner with the Arab-Israeli parties that could hold the key to a Knesset majority — even as prominent Arab candidates downplay their support for Palestinian statehood and campaign on more  palatable topics like under-policing in Arab communities.  

It’s comforting to imagine an Israeli government formed by anyone left of Netanyahu will steer instinctively towards international expectations. But a more centrist Israeli government, like any elected government anywhere, will  operate within the political space created by the policy priorities and the empathetic capacity of its voters.  

There isn’t much room for Palestinians.  

If an opposition-bloc government forms, it will surely ask for time, assuring foreign capitals that the appearance of pressure makes meaningful change harder back home.

European leaders and US Democrats poised to win at least one house of Congress in November may be tempted to pause efforts to compel Israel towards rapid implementation of the international road map in Gaza, an end to ethnic cleansing  in the West Bank, and full IDF withdrawal from Lebanon and  Syria.  

That would be a mistake.

There will be no place in Israeli  politics for a realistic discussion of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria until the foreign partners necessary to Israel’s security and economy insist, soberly and relentlessly, on creating one.

That will require tough new sanctions, not just wordplay. The things that have to be admitted are too hard, and the promises that must be broken are too many, for any Israeli leader to act alone. 

Amanda Pilz served for 22 years as a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. She is a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian affairs.

The UN food agency helping Palestinians and others in need across the world has come under scrutiny for its contract with Palantir –  the controversial US tech and AI company used by various international border police and militaries to sort data and better identify targets.

The UN’s food agency, the World Food Programme (WFP), prolonged its contract with Palantir in July, prompting civil organisations to urge the end of these agreements in a letter published on Friday (23 October).

Some 3,000 European citizens have written to the WFP’s leadership, calling for the agency to end its Palantir partnership.

The WFP holds one of the biggest biometric databases in the world, with millions of its records containing information about vulnerable populations.

WFP is effectively supporting a company that undermines its own operations in Palestine by helping kill civilians for another client, which is “a very strong contradiction,”  Giulio Carini, head of campaigns at an NGO WeMove Europe told EUobserver.

“On one hand, you’re feeding people of Gaza, but then, but on the other, you’re using software from a company whose technology is allegedly also being used to kill them” he added.

As many as 1.1 million people are reached by the WFP in Gaza each month, out of the 1.4 million facing acute food insecurity. The organisation is complaining that it had to scale down its food assistance in Gaza and the West Bank due to a lack of funding.

The WFP has argued that its use of Palantir’s software to compile its datasets and make better decisions has saved them $50m [€45m] that would otherwise be spent on inefficient management of its resources.

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Two leading Jewish groups want the EU’s next antisemitism tsar to also brief diplomats on foreign policy – despite the controversy it caused for the last one, Katharina von Schnurbein.

“EU external decisions have direct consequences for Jews living in Europe. Diplomats should hear from the person who sees those consequences every day,” said Pinchas Goldschmidt, who heads the Conference of European Rabbis (CER) in Munich, Germany.

The European Jewish Congress (EJC) in Brussels also told EUobserver: “The [EU antisemitism] coordinator should ensure that this objective is systematically reflected in all relevant EU policies, including external action and foreign policy.”

They spoke as von Schnurbein prepared to leave her EU post after 10 years to become a German “federal government commissioner for Jewish life in Germany and the fight against antisemitism” on 28 October.

The 53-year-old German baroness was highly active at events in EU capitals, had three staff, and travelled on missions to Israel, Serbia, Switzerland, and the US.

She also worked next door to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen in her Brussels HQ and had close ties with the Israeli government.

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“The ‘job’ … has been mostly accomplished,” said a senior official in Belgium’s spy service, Hugues Brulin, in a WhatsApp message to the Belgian then EU commissioner, Didier Reynders.

“Bravo for the work you did,” said Reynders.

It was back in 2022, and, at least on the surface, they were chatting about a staff reshuffle inside Belgium’s intelligence service, La Sûreté de l’Etat/Veiligheid van de Staat (VSSE) — which was already a peculiar thing for Brulin to be doing on WhatsApp with an EU official.

But their messages, seen by EUobserver and published in full below, were now also evidence in a Belgian police investigation into Reynders on money-laundering charges, which painted them in the light of a potentially criminal conspiracy.

They reconfirmed that Belgian authorities were looking into wider allegations of Reynders’ possible collusion with Russia.

Brulin’s real “job” had been to stop the VSSE from probing Reynders and his potential Russia links, according to five former and current Belgian intelligence officers who spoke to EUobserver.

And Brulin also WhatsApp-ed Reynders on how to “counterattack” a Russia whistleblower.

The 68-year-old liberal politician from Liège, in French-speaking southern Belgium, had had a glittering career before his sudden fall from grace in December 2024, when Belgian police raided his properties, and before he was subsequently charged in 2025 with having laundered some €1m via the ING Bank, using lottery tickets and cash deposits.

Reynders had been EU justice commissioner from 2019 until 30 November 2024 (just four days prior to the police raid) and Belgium’s foreign and defence minister from 2011 to 2019.

And Belgium had vetted and cleared him to read “top secret” national, EU, and Nato documents.

Meanwhile, Europe was scandalised to learn, on 10 October, that Germany’s former spy chief had been arrested for selling secrets.

But if a man with Reynders’ CV was also found guilty of corruption and foreign collusion, it would be yet another security fiasco for Western allies.

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The EU’s border force Frontex is getting overhauled next Tuesday (27 October) by a European Commission determined to give the Warsaw-based agency a larger role in deportations, more resources, and more agility to deploy.

The Brussels-executive has already proposed increasing the agency’s budget to €12bn, spread out over seven years. The money is being discussed as part of a larger drawn out EU budget fight among EU states.

Budget tussles aside, the commission has already dropped clues into what it wants from the new agency, following demands from its political masters at the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP).

The EPP had wanted to expand the border force to 30,000 from the proposed 10,000. But it is unlikely the 30,000 will be met given the difficulty of finding recruits.

Frontex currently has around 1,250 officers, who are directly employed by the agency. Its standing corps also includes officers provided by member states on long- and short-term assignments. That means they are not all on the Frontex payroll.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, ahead of this month’s EU summit, instead spoke of a “substantial increase” of the Frontex standing corps, without committing to a number.

She also called for European Border and Return Reserve, a Quick Reaction Force for crisis deployment, a Return Coordination Centre to accelerate and improve returns including from foreign states, and social media snooping to gauge any possible Ceuta-like mass arrivals.

The agency is also likely to get more personal data sharing powers with the EU police force Europol.

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A high-ranking EU politician has gone on hunger strike over the humanitarian crisis in besieged Oleshky in Ukraine.

Pina Picierno, an Italian MEP and a vice-president in the EU parliament, told EUobserver she is refusing to eat solid food to draw attention to the besieged Ukrainian town.

Eight kilometres from Kherson, Oleshky is reported to now have 1,700 inhabitants, down from 24,000 people before Russia’s full-scale invasion.

The EU says the town is without access to food, medicine, clean water and basic care.

The only route to escape is tapped with mines and rife with attack drones, Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha warned last Saturday (17 October).

Saying that Russia wants to make Oleshky a “death trap”, the Ukrainian minister urged the UN and International Red Cross to secure evacuation corridors and immediate humanitarian access to Oleshky.

“Families are starving, surviving on leftover garden vegetables, preserves and even snails,” he said.

Pope calls Putin over Oleshky

The Vatican has attempted to mediate, with Pope Leo calling last week for Russian president Vladimir Putin to arrange a humanitarian ceasefire to allow in aid. 

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The EU is pressing allies, such as the UK, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Norway, to help close a €70bn shortfall in Ukraine’s funding for next year, after president Volodymyr Zelensky warned that the war will cost €155bn in 2027.

EU Council president António Costa told MEPs in Strasbourg on Wednesday (21 October) that member states already provided 80 percent of external aid to Ukraine and “international partners must also step up their efforts”. 

“Our commitment to peace must go hand in hand with sustained pressure on the aggressor,” he also said, after meeting Zelensky at an EU summit in Brussels last week.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen also told MEPs on Wednesday: “The war will not be decided on the frontline; the war will be decided in our political will, in whether we stand up for freedom and democracy and support our Ukrainian friends.” 

Zelensky’s €155bn figure refers to Ukraine’s total war-related spending in 2027, part of which Kyiv covers from its own budget.

But that still left a €70bn gap that Ukraine needed foreign partners to fill, as next year approached.

The EU has already agreed a €90bn loan covering 2026 and 2027, meant to meet two-thirds of Ukraine’s financing needs over that period.

The remaining third was supposed to come from other partners, but so far that money has been secured only for 2026, not for 2027.

Costa told MEPs on Wednesday that €16bn had been disbursed this year under the defence line of the loan, while another €17bn could be sent to Ukraine if anti-corruption reforms were implemented.

“Our determination to support Ukraine and its people is stronger than ever,” he said.

EU hopes for Ukraine cash from allies

Meanwhile, EU commissioner Maroš Šefčovič also indicated on Monday that Britain will be asked to increase funding to Ukraine, speaking ahead of an EU-UK summit on 20 November.

“Following the signature of a contribution agreement on 13 July 2026, the UK can now participate under the EU’s €90bn Ukraine support loan,” he said.

Both the EU and UK would support Ukraine “as long as it takes to bring Russia’s illegal war of aggression to an end”, Šefčovič added.

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Over coffee, an Israeli woman I know began to cry. “I’m 42,” she said, “and I’ve spent my entire adult life held captive by Bibi.”

Benjamin Netanyahu has not been Israel’s prime minister for every one of those years. Yet even out of office, Israeli politics rarely escaped his gravitational pull.

For him or against him, public life kept arranging itself around his presence.

Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having previously held office from 1996 to 1999 and from 2009 to 2021, and from 2022 onward.

Hungarians know something about that feeling. For 16 years, Viktor Orbán was not merely Hungary’s prime minister but the organising fact of Hungarian politics. Institutions bent around him, opponents defined themselves against him, and arguments somehow ended up being about him.

On 12 April, that era ended.

Péter Magyar’s insurgent Tisza party defeated Fidesz after 16 uninterrupted years in power. The final results gave Tisza 141 of parliament’s 199 seats, a two-thirds majority.

The temptation is to tell a simple story of liberation: the dominant leader fell, the spell broke, democracy returned. But political systems leave habits behind, and Orbán’s most durable legacy may prove to be the way Hungarians learned to imagine politics itself.

That is also Magyar’s dilemma.

Opposition movements confronting personalised systems often conclude that they, too, need a protagonist capable of gathering diffuse grievances into a political force.

Yet the qualities that help an insurgency win are not necessarily those needed to build a pluralist order afterwards. Campaigns reward concentration, and democracy depends on dispersing authority.

A challenger may have to become indispensable in order to win. Governing democratically requires eventually proving that he is not.

For people my age, Orbán’s rise was a rupture because we remember other governments and possibilities. Many of my students, now in their 20s, do not. Their political adulthood unfolded almost entirely under Fidesz. Orbán was simply there, as unavoidable as the weather.

Power can come to look distant and durable, participation noble but futile, and institutions captured or irrelevant. Politics becomes something done to you rather than something you do.

Conversations with Orbán

I know how deeply that can lodge itself in the mind. For five years, I have had countless conversations with Orbán in which I argued with him and tried to persuade him to change course. All of them took place in my dreams.

Supporters and opponents experienced Orbán’s system differently, but both learned to orient themselves around the same centre of gravity. Loyalists read its signals, while critics watched it constantly and defined themselves against it.

Parties that spend years confronting a dominant machine tend to centralise themselves. Message discipline becomes existential, disagreement can look like sabotage, and restraint like something to discuss after victory.

That is why Hungary’s challenge is larger than reversing Orbán’s policies.

A government elected to repair democratic institutions has to accept restraints precisely when it can most easily avoid them: strengthening parliament even when it dominates it, protecting independent media when they attack the government, and creating institutions whose authority does not depend on proximity to the prime minister.

Older Hungarians understandably speak about restoration: rebuilding institutions, restoring judicial independence, returning to democratic normality.

But “return” means something different when you are 25. You cannot return to a political world you never inhabited. For younger Hungarians, democracy cannot merely be recovered; it has to become real for the first time.

That distinction matters beyond Hungary. Opponents of personalised populism often offer restoration as their programme.

Yet generations raised amid democratic erosion may have little memory of the normality they are being asked to recover. Democratic politics has to show that dispersed power need not mean ineffective government, that disagreement need not threaten the state, and that losing an election need not mean losing the country.

Success should also mean making politics less consuming. Most democratic life is not election night but local meetings, newspapers and arguments about schools, budgets and public space.

A healthy political order allows citizens to pay less attention to the leader because fewer things depend on what that leader wants. Personalised rule teaches the opposite lesson. Even resistance can become dependence.

This is where Hungary’s experience returns me to my conversation about Israel.

Israelis are due to vote on 27 October in an election in which Netanyahu once again occupies much of the political landscape.

Whatever voters decide, Hungary suggests a question that will remain whenever his long political era eventually ends: can political life be reorganised around institutions and competing interests rather than around the presence, or absence, of one man?

Removing a dominant political figure does not remove the habits formed around him. Supporters have to imagine their politics without the leader they regarded as indispensable, while opponents have to decide what they stand for when opposition to him is no longer enough to bind them together.

Hungary’s experience suggests that this is where democratic renewal really begins – not with replacing one dominant figure with another, but with building institutions and political movements that no longer require one.

My friend’s tears were for the time she felt had been taken from her. Hungary’s younger generation, now free of Orbán, cannot mourn in quite the same way, because many have no memory of political adulthood against which to measure what was lost.

Their challenge, now, is not to recover an old normal but to create something they have never experienced: a public life in which politics belongs to citizens without consuming them, and in which no leader becomes so indispensable that an entire country must organise itself around him.

The EU’s top diplomat has backed the idea of a Black Sea naval mission to protect grain ships from Russian drones – but this would require a much bigger effort than Europe’s existing Red Sea operation, while air-policing might be more effective.

“The EU should send a mission to the Black Sea,” said EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas in the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Tuesday (20 October).

“To protect merchant shipping, not to escalate, not to scare anyone, but to make sure that we will supply safely fuel, merchandise at normal prices, anything we need. This is how it should be,” she said.

Some “six attacks in 10 days by suspected Russian drones marks a dangerous and unacceptable escalation,” in the region, Kallas added, with “rescuers
still searching for seven sailors missing after the drone attack on two tankers near Romania’s Black Sea coast”.

The Russian attacks were costing Ukraine €60m a day in lost exports of grain and fertiliser, Kallas also said.

And Russia had changed its tactics to start targeting people instead of cargo, said Sidharth Kaushal, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defence think-tank in London.

“Before, they targeted ports, not civilians, or vessels at sea. They realised that threat to life is a much more effective deterrent to commercial shipping than threat to cargo,” he told EUobserver.

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The EU “will not drill and will not buy” Arctic oil and gas, EU officials said on Tuesday (20 October), as the European Commission presented its new Arctic strategy. 

“Our position on Arctic oil, gas and coal has not changed,” a senior EU official told reporters. “It’s fairly simple. We will not drill in the Arctic, and we will not buy hydrocarbons from the Arctic.”

The strategy follows months of heavy lobbying by Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre and his cabinet. 

Oslo used the energy supply disruption caused by the Iran war to push the EU to drop its 2021 support for a moratorium on oil and gas drilling in the Arctic, insisting that it was crucial for future energy security. 

But EU officials made clear on Tuesday they did not buy that argument. “We do not need Arctic resources to keep our energy supply secure,” the official said.

What happened to the moratorium?

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Europe is supposed to be financing its defence together. It barely is.

Of the €800bn announced under ReArm Europe in March 2025, €650bn is not common money. It is an estimate of the extra room governments get under the national escape clause to spend up to 1.5 percent of GDP more on defence for four years.

Each country still pays for that spending itself.

The room is also temporary: EU Commission simulations suggest that maintaining higher defence spending after 2028 could require additional annual fiscal adjustment of 0.25 to 0.4 percentage points of GDP from 2029.

The other €150bn is SAFE, and it is loans, not grants.

The EU borrows and lends the money on, and each country repays its share. Grants are small: €1.5bn from the European Defence Industry Programme for 2025-2027, plus the European Defence Fund for joint research.

Not every country has used these tools, as Table 1 shows. The Netherlands and Sweden have used neither. Like Germany, which has taken only the clause, they can borrow at least as cheaply as the EU, so SAFE gets them nothing.

France has taken SAFE but not the clause, to protect the credibility of its budget plans.

Table 1. Who uses SAFE and the national escape clause

Source: Council of the EU, European Commission. Data as of 17 October 2026. * Hungary: allocated €16.2bn, now requesting €5.4bn; still pending. ** Italy: the Commission backed its request on 8 October 2026; the Council has yet to decide.

Where SAFE does matter is on the eastern flank. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia can borrow the equivalent of five to eight percent of their GDP, and Poland almost five percent.

Graph 1. SAFE loans as a share of GDP, by country (%)

Source: Council of the EU, European Commission, Eurostat. SAFE loans only, as a share of 2025 GDP. Amounts approved by the Council, except Italy and Hungary (* revised requests of €8bn and €5.4bn, September 2026). Data as of 17 October 2026.

That leaves private money.

The European Investment Bank and the European Investment Fund are trying to bring in private investors, partly by removing the reputational stigma of financing defence.

But defence is almost a monopsony: the state is nearly the only buyer. Without a clear flow of public orders, private investment will be hard to come by.

So Europe barely borrows together. And it buys alone.

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MEPs have put themselves on a collision course with EU governments by rejecting plans for a 17-percent cut in foreign spending – instead demanding additional spending worth €25bn. 

Earlier this month, the Irish government, which holds the six-month rotating EU council presidency, proposed that €38bn of cuts be made from the ‘Global Europe’ heading, which covers foreign aid, as part of an overall package of €141bn of cuts to the seven-year EU budget, known as the multi-annual financial framework (MFF). 

But in a vote on Monday evening (19 October), the European Parliament’s development committee instead backed a dedicated minimum budget of €25bn for humanitarian aid, as well as dedicated budget lines for a Gaza reconstruction fund and for candidate countries. Put together, that would mean a €25bn increase on the EU Commission’s original budget of €200bn for the Global Europe heading. 

The position agreed by MEPs, by a 61-to-34 vote margin, will eventually form the basis of negotiations between MEPs and ministers when EU governments agree their position on the budget. 

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has been shortlisted for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, an annual human-rights award from the European Parliament.

The announcement on Monday (19 October) comes after US president Donald Trump put his weight behind Israeli efforts to discredit the international judicial body by extending sanctions against it.

The ICC issued an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes, as well as other senior Israeli officials and Hamas. The US then responded by targeting its judges by impeding their day-to-day activities such as banking.

New sanctions against the court were announced by the US administration this month after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge who wrote a UN report concluding Israel is committing ​genocide in Gaza.

The ICC court labelled the move as an “assault on the rule of law” and called on countries to step up to protect it.

Sakharov Prize finalists named 

Members of the EU parliament’s foreign affairs committee shortlisted the ICC and its members for the Sakharov Prize.

Named after the Soviet nuclear scientist dissident Andrei Sakharov, the award has been previously awarded to the likes of Iranian protest icon Mahsa Amini and to the Ukrainian people enduring Russia’s attacks.

“We stand by the ICC and its officials, and we are committed to safeguarding its work,” said Yannis Maniatis, Greek MEP for the Socialists & Democrats group which nominated the ICC for the award. “If the aggressors become the victims, and if we stand by helplessly as international justice erodes, we risk allowing those who believe themselves above the law to prevail.”

Tundu Lissu, a Tanzanian opposition figure in court for inciting the public to disrupt an election and facing the possibility of death row, is also a Sakharov Prize finalist. “There is no doubt about the political nature of his detention,” said David McAllister, MEP for the European People’s Party who co-nominated Lissu.

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It is hard for European allies to know which is worse, hearing their sacrifice in the US-led war in Afghanistan mocked by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, seeing his State Department counterpart Marco Rubio dissembling about the interruption to Starlink service in Ukraine, or watching the commander-in-chief of the free world blithely end sanctions on Russia. 

One option is to sit tight and hope that next month’s mid-terms will bring deliverance.

Mid-term blues?

It is possible, perhaps, that a huge political defeat for Donald Trump will change American foreign policy, though those who sincerely hanker for the eras of Joe Biden and Barack Obama may need to adjust their rose-tinted filters.

More likely is that constitutional tussles will make the US even more distracted and unpredictable. Who really believes that a midnight phone call alerting the president to a surprise Russian incursion into Nato territory will gain a firmer response if the Democrats control Congress? 

It is also tempting simply to wallow in outrage.

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Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday (16 October) that the US-Russia ‘diesel deal’ came as a surprise and could lead to further sanctions relief for Moscow.

“We cannot treat the agreements concerning diesel and coal as isolated cases … gas could be next. I am absolutely convinced of that,” Zelensky told reporters in Brussels, after meeting with EU leaders. 

“The risks I am talking about are clear: sanctions could be progressively eased,” he warned.

EU leaders are expected to “regret” the diesel deal in their summit conclusions, while discussions on a new package of sanctions against Russia are still underway.

“It is not a time to release sanctions on Russia,” said EU Council president Antonio Costa on Friday, alongside EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Zelensky before the discussion with EU leaders.

“We will not lift any sanctions unless Russia ends the war,” confirmed von der Leyen, adding that Europe will keep working on “pressuring Russia”.

Europe has adopted 21 packages of sanctions on Russia since the beginning of the war, alongside the listing of thousands of individuals and entities, and is currently working on the 22nd.

But one Ukrainian senior diplomat told EUobserver that the coming months could be crucial to agree on more sanctions against Moscow, since February is seen as a possible deadline given the upcoming 2027 French presidential elections.

Russia’s economy has come under growing pressure from Western sanctions. Although a month-on-month decrease in exports was observed (six percent for fossil fuels, eight percent for crude oil), the US diesel deal could offer Moscow a potential lifeline. 

No concessions

The diesel deal is widely seen as a way to restart peace talks. At the same time, the United States is pushing Kyiv and Moscow toward a negotiated settlement, which puts Ukraine under growing pressure to come to the table, even though any deal could force it to make painful concessions.

Zelensky, however, has warned against any deal that would compromise Ukraine’s sovereignty or territorial integrity.

“Putin plans to stick around much longer. He is building a Russia that looks like North Korea,” he wrote on X.

Instead, the Ukrainian president has turned to European “real leaders”, seeking to shore up their political and military support and strengthen Kyiv’s position in any future negotiations. 

And in the words of von der Leyen, Europe is already helping Ukraine to prepare for “winter-isation”, which for Zelensky should translate into more funds and defence support.

This week, the commission disembursed €2.9bn to Kyiv to purchase drones, air defence systems, missiles, radars, electronic warfare systems and ammunition, as part of the EU’s €90bn loan, backed by EU leaders last year. 

But Kyiv has warned it will need tens of billions more to continue fighting against Russia, as the war intensifies on the front lines and the number of attacks in Ukrainian cities increases.

Ukraine’s defence needs are estimated for 2026 around €23bn and Kyiv still needs to fund a hole of roughly €69.3bn for 2027.

“We will have to increase the funding once again,” German chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday before meeting EU leaders in Brussels. 

Protect Russian frozen assets

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