I had hobbies once, I think – don’t quote me on it, it was so long ago that it now feels like a past life. Once upon a time I played video games and I read daft and interesting pieces on internet culture and people’s lives, and I saw my friends and we talked about all manners of things, and it was wonderful.
Now, though? Well, right now I’m focused on Serbia and Brazil; Bulgaria and Israel. Of course, I’ve spent so much time caring about America that it feels like second nature to me, but I’m also trying to be careful, and remember that I must pace myself as Spain is already on the horizon and, next year, my Sauron-like gaze will be turning itself towards France and Poland, among many others.
I have, in short, got myself hooked on elections. It isn’t an entirely new pastime: after all, one of my clearest memories of 2008 is of the night I spent forcing myself to stay awake so I could see if Obama really was about to become president. I was 16, and celebrated by leaving a little note under my dad’s door at 4am telling him the good news, before finally heading to bed myself.
Maybe that was the problem: my first taste of electoral politics was a delicious one, and left me desperate for more. It took a long time for this particular mania to reach its peak, but 2026 really was – and is – the year when things got out of control. “Aleksandar Vučić’s been kicked out by the electorate!”, I ecstatically told my boyfriend on a train recently as we were returning from a jaunt.
His relative lack of interest failed to register, and so I told him about Serbia’s new government; a coalition built from a student movement, which had been protesting the autocrat for the past two years. Mere hours later, I went to bother him again – this time as he was cooking us dinner – to let him know that Lula seemed to have unexpectedly found himself in the lead again in Brazil, and was likely to defeat Jair Bolsonaro’s son after all.
The next morning, I devoured endless pieces about both, seeking lessons the rest of us ought to learn on how to defeat our own homegrown ghouls, but mostly desperate for details, and data, and analysis, and any shred of information the press could offer.
Debate soon raged on social media about this unhealthy new habit developed by thousands of nerds across the world; can’t we just care about what happens in our own backyards instead? Isn’t this obsession with events happening halfway across the world eventually going to lead us to madness?
I wanted to agree with those warnings but, ultimately, realised that I couldn’t. What is happening in these elections usually matters to me, not merely as a political anorak but as a person living in the world.
Versions of Serbia and Bulgaria that get closer to the EU and further away from Russia are good news for Ukraine, Europe and all of us. A Brazilian government which refuses to treat the Amazon as Earth’s lung would have been catastrophic for the future of the human race. Whatever ends up happening in Gaza can, if the recent past tells us anything, profoundly influence national politics across the west.
Our world is a hyper-globalised one, and one domino falling may threaten the whole edifice. We’re also living in tense and difficult times, with tech-enabled populism threatening democracies across the globe. If Viktor Orbán, Donald Trump and Javier Milei can be best friends, then why can’t we also get together and try to learn from one another?
In a decade that’s so far short on good news, I’ll take all the glee I can take – from kids dancing in the streets in the Balkans to workers celebrating in the favelas of São Paulo. Their fight may not always be my fight, but their joy is definitely contagious.
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