There is a moment in every election when a society holds its breath. The ballots are counted, the maps light up, and the arithmetic decides not just who governs, but whether a nation can trust itself. In the past week, three very different countries—Brazil, Serbia, and Israel—went through that moment, and each emerged with a different result. In Brazil, incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the presidential runoff, completing a remarkable comeback after trailing the far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro in the first round. Flávio is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted over an attempted coup following his defeat in the 2022 election, and his campaign was supposed to be the next chapter in that family’s political story. Instead, the voters wrote a different ending. In Serbia, President Aleksandar Vučić, who had held power for fourteen years, was defeated by a protest-driven movement called the Students’ List, which secured 52.7 percent of the vote and a parliamentary majority. It was a stunning rebuke to a leader who had seemed untouchable for more than a decade. In Israel, the election produced no clear winner at all. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition failed to secure a majority of seats, but so did the opposition led by Gadi Eisenkot. The opposition could theoretically reach a majority by joining forces with Arab-Israeli parties, but that would be an almost unprecedented arrangement in Israeli politics. Three countries, three very different democratic verdicts. But beneath the surface, they shared something disturbing: a flood of disinformation designed to make voters doubt the process itself.
Disinformation is not new to politics, and it can mean many things. It includes demonstrably false statements made by politicians, falsehoods that spread spontaneously online or in traditional media, foreign and domestic interference, AI-generated content, fake videos and images circulated for profit, and everything in between. All of it is corrosive, but in these three elections, a particular strain of disinformation stood out. It was not aimed at any single candidate or policy. It was aimed at the very idea that an election could be fair. The goal was to delegitimize the democratic process, to persuade voters that their participation was pointless, and to prepare the ground for rejecting an outcome that did not go the right way. Brazil offered the clearest example. After Lula’s victory, Flávio Bolsonaro refused to acknowledge the result, even though the margin was so decisive that no reasonable person could claim the outcome was uncertain. His refusal opened the floodgates to a wave of baseless conspiracy theories, shared not only in Brazil but around the world, claiming that the election had been rigged and stolen. He received encouragement from Donald Trump, who has made election denial a kind of international brand. Flávio then fled Brazil and sought refuge in the United States, leaving behind a political movement that had been trained to believe the worst about its own democracy. It was a perfect illustration of how quickly a candidate’s wounded pride can turn into a national crisis of confidence.
Serbia’s story was different on the surface, but the underlying pattern was the same. Vučić conceded immediately, and that concession seemed, at first, to be a model of democratic grace. But his explanation for defeat was anything but gracious. The students’ victory, he claimed, was not the result of ordinary Serbians voting for change. It was the product of interference by several European countries and the American “deep state,” a shadowy force he suggested was hostile to Donald Trump. This is a strange and telling detail. Several prominent figures in the MAGA movement have openly backed Vučić, and he has long maintained friendly relations with Putin’s Russia. Serbia remains the only EU candidate country that has not imposed sanctions on Moscow, and Vučić has consistently played a double game between East and West. By blaming Western powers for his loss, he was borrowing a script that has been used again and again in authoritarian circles: when the people vote against you, it cannot be because they genuinely want something different. It must be because foreign powers staged a coup. He even described the Students’ List victory as “the legitimisation of a revolution.” That phrase carries a heavy weight in Serbia, and it echoes a central theme of Russian propaganda—the claim that the color revolutions in Georgia, Armenia, and Ukraine were not popular uprisings but Western conspiracies. In this telling, democracy itself is a foreign weapon, and the voters who cast ballots against a leader are not citizens but pawns. The danger of such rhetoric is that it doesn’t just insult the intelligence of voters; it prepares them to reject the legitimacy of any election they lose, and to see their own neighbors as enemies.
Israel showed how quickly this can spiral in real time. On election day, while polling stations were still open, Netanyahu took to social media to dramatize the vote, posting alarming content and making wild accusations. He openly claimed that “Muslim Brotherhood supporters” were “storming polling stations and stealing the election.” It was a vivid image, and it spread rapidly across the internet. But there was no evidence behind it. After the vote, his party, Likud, alleged that Arab parties had “stolen” the Israeli election and demanded an investigation. Israeli police examined the claims and rejected them, citing a lack of evidence. None of this changed the arithmetic. Netanyahu’s coalition fell short of a majority, and the opposition also fell short. The possibility of a government led by Gadi Eisenkot depended on cooperation with Arab-Israeli parties—a step that would break a long-standing taboo and would require an extraordinary level of trust. But even as the political negotiations began, the disinformation machine kept working, not to promote a solution but to poison the well. The message was simple: if the result is not what we want, it must be because someone cheated. That message may not have convinced everyone, but it planted a seed of doubt, and in a society already fractured along religious, ethnic, and ideological lines, doubt can be as dangerous as anger. It turns the democratic process into a battlefield, where the only question is not what is true, but who has the power to make their version of events stick.
The common denominator in all three cases is not difficult to identify. It is the playbook popularized by Donald Trump after the 2020 US election, and it has never really gone away. Trump helped normalize the idea that an election can be “stolen” by invisible forces, and he has never stopped returning to that theme. Now his political allies and admirers across the world are applying the same logic to their own contests. In Brazil, Flávio Bolsonaro had Trump’s support when he refused to concede. In Serbia, Vučić has received open backing from prominent figures in the MAGA movement, even as he blamed the American “deep state” for his loss. In Israel, Netanyahu’s rhetoric about stolen elections sounds as though it was copied from a Trump rally. And in the United States itself, the same tactics are being deployed ahead of upcoming elections. Trump administration officials have sought to block the certification of a Senate race in Alaska, threatened California election officials with imprisonment over their position on mail-in ballots, and cast doubt on the legitimacy of Minnesota’s Senate race should the Republican candidate lose. Trump has even promised a reward of one million dollars for reports of voter fraud in past elections and the elections to come. The exact details vary from place to place, but the underlying strategy is always the same: create enough noise and confusion that the truth becomes just another opinion, and the democratic process becomes just another battlefield. It is a strategy that treats democracy not as a shared system of rules, but as a game of power where anything that gets you to victory is justified.
Whether the source is Russia, as in Serbia, or the United States, as in Israel and Brazil, the lesson has been learned across the globe: when democracy fails to deliver the desired result—or when there is even a fear that it might not—you can try to delegitimize it. You can claim that foreign powers interfered, that shadowy networks rigged the machines, that minority groups stole the vote. You can refuse to concede, demand investigations, and flood the airwaves with suspicion. This is not a victimless crime. It is a dangerous game that can easily end in riots, uprisings, and violence. We have seen it before, and we may see it again, because the people who spread these lies rarely care about the consequences. They care about power. But democracy depends on something fragile: the willingness to lose. When a candidate accepts defeat, they are not just being polite. They are affirming that the people, not the strongest voice, are sovereign. That is what makes peaceful transitions possible. It is what allows a society to move forward, even when half the country is disappointed. Without it, elections become a prelude to chaos. The three elections last week remind us that this lesson is not automatic. It must be learned, defended, and, above all, believed. Democracy cannot survive if we stop trusting it, and trust is the one thing that no amount of disinformation can replace.