In the space of roughly 10 days, the two largest democracies in the Americas delivered setbacks to the populist right.

In Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva staged a narrow but remarkable comeback, defeating Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, in a run-off election after trailing in the first round.

This week, American voters handed control of both chambers of the US Congress to Democrats in a sharp rebuke of candidates riding on US President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.

Together the results challenge the seemingly unstoppable global rightward shift that has defined much of the past decade. They may also reflect a broader anti-incumbency mood in which voters are punishing leaders for failing to deliver on prices, jobs and basic services.

The US “blue wave” continued a string of losses for the right, following the rejection of Bolsonaro in Brazil and the defeats of former Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic and former Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, said John Feffer, director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank in Washington.

Feffer added that voters in today’s “quicksilver environment of social media” responded positively to candidates who “promise sweeping change”.

“And thus, the political pendulum swings from left to right and back again.”However, he argued that the far-right movement was not “just another conventional option on the political menu”.

The movement “offers something radically different because it threatens to undermine the very democratic norms by which it has achieved power”, Feffer said.

All eyes now turn to Spain, where incumbent Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has framed the outcome of the US midterm elections as a sign that the global right-wing wave is running out of steam.

“Yesterday, American society voted against policies that only impoverish. Against hatred. Against sexism. Against climate change denial and against the privileges of the elites,” he said on social media on Tuesday.

Sanchez, who is fighting for his own political survival in a snap general election scheduled for late November, added: “It happened in Brazil. It just happened in the US. And it will happen soon in Spain.”But while populist candidates have hit stumbling blocks in the Americas, the right-wing wave in Europe remains remarkably resilient and continues to expand its institutional footprint, with France and Germany sitting right at the centre of the storm.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally has moved from the political fringes to become a major force, wielding growing influence over minority governments despite repeated efforts to keep the party out of power.

In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) has made historic electoral gains, particularly in the east, challenging the post-war political consensus.

While Trump has cheered on Europe’s right-wing figures, hosting Orban at Mar-a-Lago and fostering ties between American conservative groups and European populists, the European movements do not rely on Washington to survive.

In fact, far-right politicians in Europe have been distancing themselves from Trump following the Republican rout and his growing unpopularity across the continent, despite previously drawing parallels to his Maga movement.

“Trump had promised his voters not to pursue an interventionist foreign policy … This broken promise has now come back to haunt the Republicans,” AfD co-leader Alice Weidel told German media, referring to the Iran war.

According to Francesco Strazzari, professor of international relations at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, “the story of the US midterms goes beyond the Democratic victory”.

“For Europe’s far-right nationalists, alignment with Trump no longer means riding a growing political wave. They have to recalculate,” he wrote on social media on Tuesday.

Trump has tried to position himself as a leader of the global right-wing movement. He celebrated Javier Milei’s 2023 victory in Argentina, maintained close ties with the Bolsonaros in Brazil and backed Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.

But ties have been souring for some time. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, once seen as a close ideological ally, has openly criticised Trump over trade, Ukraine and his foreign policy.

In April last year, Mark Carney of Canada’s Liberal Party defeated Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader backed by Trump, to become prime minister, dealing another setback to the American president’s efforts to build political influence beyond the US.

This year, Trump aggressively endorsed Bolsonaro in Brazil, even calling the result “rigged” and a “terrible look”, without evidence.

Oliver Stuenkel, a senior fellow affiliated with the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the rightward shift in Latin America “is more fragile than it seems and may not last as long as expected”.

He pointed to Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil, along with signs of political instability and weak approval ratings for right-wing leaders elsewhere in the region, as evidence of that fragility.

Bolivia’s centre-right president, Rodrigo Paz, who took office in November last year after nearly 20 years of socialist rule, has faced repeated protests over subsidy cuts and living costs.

Right-wing Chilean President Jose Antonio Kast rose to power in March. His approval rating has plunged from nearly 60 per cent at the start of his term to 27 per cent. The drop has been driven by a weak economy and, more recently, controversy over the early release of convicted sex offenders.

The roots of the modern right-wing populist wave can be traced back to 2016. As Britain voted to leave the European Union, Trump was preparing to rewrite American conservatism. Both events marked a turning point in a political shift driven by ultranationalism, anti-globalisation and a rejection of the post-war liberal order.

But the promises of that moment have faced their own tests. Britain continues to grapple with the economic consequences of Brexit. The US, too, has faced economic and political challenges under Trump. In both countries, the promise of national renewal has collided with the realities of governing.

John Van Reenen, Ronald Coase School professor at the London School of Economics, described it as a “populist doom loop” in an October paper published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

He wrote that sluggish gains in living standards fuelled support for populist parties offering simple solutions, such as ending immigration.

“Populists demand bad economic policies and usually get some of these indirectly through pressurising centrist parties. This leads to even weaker growth, more voter unrest and further undermines the ‘establishment’, giving more support to the populists.”Feffer argued that the central challenge for the left and centre was to build “a new, robust internationalism” that delivered tangible benefits to ordinary people while protecting the planet for future generations.

Until then, far-right movements would continue to attract support through their anti-globalisation agenda, even if they lost individual elections, he said.

“They don’t want to be subject to the pendulum swings of democratic politics. They want to rip out the pendulum so that they can remain in power indefinitely,” he said.