The series of recent elections across the globe have been read as a stinging defeat for right-wing authoritarians, which they are. But maybe more notable is another element: that denial of and efforts to simply reverse unfavorable election results now seem to have become de rigueur for the transnational Right.

All four of the major elections taking place in the ten-day period from October 25 to November 3 have seen or are seeing efforts by right-wing politicians to cast doubt on results where they lost or are likely to, and to engineer a way to change them in their favor.

In Brazil, right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro — whose father is serving a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for trying to organize a coup when he lost the presidential election four years ago — responded to his own shock defeat by announcing a legal challenge to annul the result over the courts’ last-minute extension of voting hours (even though his own campaign had requested the extension). Flávio has now, Juan Guaidó–style, just declared himself the president from Miami, alleging election fraud (before, confusingly, almost immediately deleting the post and declaring himself the country’s rightful “leader” instead).

In Serbia, where the authoritarian former President Aleksandar Vučić was toppled from power after twelve years, there were mounting signs he was preparing to launch a violent coup after badly losing the election, before changing his mind and conceding. By the account of one of Serbia’s own former top anti-terrorism officials, Vučić had “sent 4,000 police and 3,000 thugs to central Belgrade” but was talked down from going through with it by European officials.

In Israel, the scandal-tainted and genocidal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now engineered an investigation by Shin Bet, the country’s domestic security service, into the unprecedented voter share won by Israel’s Arab parties, having accused them of “stealing” the election. If Netanyahu’s opposition can get over their refusal to form a government with Arabs, they will block Netanyahu from another stint as prime minister.

And of course, there’s the originator himself: US President Donald Trump, who has since virtually the moment he entered office last year been carrying out a slow-rolling, telegraphed effort to delegitimize the upcoming midterm election result, as presidents’ parties tend to suffer a setback in midterms. As part of this effort, Trump and, at this point, pretty much the entire Republican Party have incessantly seeded the idea that election results can’t be trusted and that his opponents will “cheat” (even as he’s publicly urged his own voters to “cheat like hell”), and they have done everything from trying to purge voters and preemptively challenging the legitimacy of the Alaska election to reportedly discussing simply refusing to certify election results.

Six years ago, Trump’s claims that his 2020 election loss was rigged and efforts to overturn it were read as just the irresponsible sour grapes of one particularly dishonest, erratic politician. (Though let’s give credit where credit’s due: he was technically beaten to the punch in recent years by fellow losers in Indonesia, Ecuador, and especially Bolivia, where in 2019 Trump’s first administration backed the Right’s effort to baselessly cast doubt on and ultimately overturn its election loss through a coup.)

But the election-denial movement Trump kick-started and that is now a nationwide phenomenon has become something of a model beyond US borders. This flat-out refusal to accept defeat and simply live in a self-created, alternate reality where the loser has actually won, numbers be damned, has now become standard operating procedure for right-wing leaders.

According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance’s 2024 report on the state of global democracy, losing candidates rejected the result in 20 percent of the world’s elections between 2020 and 2024, something it calls a “growing phenomenon.” That includes Guatemala in 2023, Peru in 2021, and Brazil in 2022. (To be fair, it’s not always right-wingers — Colombia’s leftist former President Gustavo Petro at one point suspended the presidential transition earlier this year, alleging fraud.)

Some of this recent spate of efforts to reverse the democratic process have failed or look doubtful because the victory margin for the winners made them untenable — reportedly the reason why both Bolsonaro and Vučić aborted their nascent attempts to steal the election.

We will have to see how Netanyahu’s effort fares. The historic 80 percent turnout from Arab voters will make it hard to invalidate votes, and multiple reports have it that the alleged foreign interference that supposedly led to it was actually small-scale and “not something that hasn’t happened in the past.” But Netanyahu’s play may be to use this to make it politically impossible for his opposition to form a government with the Arab parties. Trump’s efforts will likewise be concentrated on those states where the result is likely to be close — but those, too, could be undermined if Democratic candidates end up outdoing polling in the face of widespread unhappiness with Trump’s presidency.

Whatever happens, election denial seems firmly here to stay and is now global. We may end up collectively dodging the very worst-case scenarios of election theft this time. But what happens when future results are close enough or otherwise conducive to right-wing claims of illegitimacy and efforts to overturn? It’s a question the Left now, sadly, has to plan and organize for no matter where one happens to live.