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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday intensified allegations of election fraud by Arab-led parties, describing suspected foreign interference as an "earthquake" and demanding an immediate investigation by the police and the country's top internal security agency. In a social media post, Netanyahu cited Central Elections Committee (CEC) chief Justice Noam Sohlberg's decision to ask Shin Bet chief David Zini to investigate suspicions of foreign funding and improper influence in Tuesday's election. "The Ra'amgate affair is an earthquake. They stole the elections in Israel!" Netanyahu wrote, targeting the Arab-led Ra'am (the United Arab List) and the Joint List alliance. He alleged that foreign entities had interfered in Tuesday's parliamentary elections and bribed voters in favour of Arab-led parties. The allegations come amid an inconclusive election in which neither Netanyahu's bloc nor the opposition camp led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot has secured a ...
Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flavio Bolsonaro and his family arrived in Miami on Wednesday after he refused to concede the election to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and fled the country. In a circuitous journey, Bolsonaro left for Argentina on Tuesday with his wife and two daughters, then travelled to Ecuador, according to Argentina officials and flight data. The 45-year-old senator, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, visited the White House in May, and the Trump administration approved US visas for him and his family this week. Bolsonaro's father, Jair Bolsonaro, also fled to Florida after losing the 2022 presidential election to Lula before returning to Brazil three months later. Flavio Bolsonaro is under investigation by Brazil's Supreme Court, accused of corruption, money laundering and tax evasion. The court had ordered him to hand over his regular and diplomatic passports by noon Tuesday. It remained unclear whether he had complied, but allies said .
Serbians are voting Sunday in a parliamentary election that is seen as a showdown between the Balkan country's populist leader Aleksandar Vucic and a movement of university students who led protests against him for almost two years. Though Serbia's 6.4 million voters get to choose from 18 parties hoping to enter the 250-member Parliament, the election has taken shaped as a referendum between Vucic's right-wing Serbian Progressive Party and the youth-backed Students' List. The main contenders are believed to be polling neck-and-neck, making Sunday's election the most uncertain in recent years. Turnout is expected to be high and could push most smaller parties below the 3% threshold needed to make it into the assembly. While Vucic has routinely outplayed Serbia's fractured opposition in the past, the leaderless youth movement has proved to be a tough opponent that rattled his firm grip on power in Serbia like no one else could in the past 14 years since his party took office. A ...
For two decades since leaving Israel for Canada, Yael Natra said, she didn't consider returning to vote in her home country's elections. She felt it wasn't right to cast a ballot in a place she no longer lived. But now, after seeing the far right gain power, Natra, 61, said she believed she had no choice. Ahead of Israel's election on Tuesday - the first since the 2023 Hamas-led attacks and ensuing wars in the region - Natra spent thousands of dollars to travel nearly 6,000 miles from Toronto to Tel Aviv to be in the country and vote, she said. Israeli law generally requires citizens to vote in person in the country, with narrow exceptions for diplomats and certain official emissaries abroad. Natra said she plans to cast her ballot for parties not aligned with the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. "The Israel that I grew up in is disappearing," she said in an interview from Toronto, citing an eroding democracy and deeply divided society. "If something won
India's Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar recently asked the US administration how elections in America can be held without a valid photo identification card, President Donald Trump said, making a case for mandatory photo IDs for every US voter to curb "electoral fraud". Trump, in a post on Truth Social, further said less than one per cent of voters in India used postal ballots in the recent general elections, and every voter had a valid photo identity document. The US president made these remarks to drum up support for the SAVE America Act which would require Americans to show proof of citizenship to register to vote, impose a nationwide voter identification requirement and severely limit voting by mail. "Earlier this month, India's Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, asked our Administration - How can you have Elections in the US without a valid Photo ID," Trump wrote. "India's last Election had 646,000,000 Voters! Less than one per cent voted by mail, and every ..
Conservative outsider Abelardo de la Espriella, a millionaire political neophyte, will be Colombia's next president after electoral authorities on Wednesday declared him the winner of Sunday's runoff election. The businessman and lawyer, whose ventures include a clothing line, wine and rum brands, and a restaurant, earned US President Donald Trump's endorsement despite never having run for office. He defeated progressive lawmaker Ivan Cepeda by 1 percentage point, or more than 251,000 votes. The result effectively was an indictment of outgoing President Gustavo Petro's government, whose policies Cepeda had promised to continue, including a largely failed effort to establish dialogue with multiple armed groups. Electoral authorities published all but a fraction of the vote count hours after polls closed Sunday. Petro and Cepeda did not accept those results, with the latter saying he would wait for a recount to do so. Authorities finished the recount before declaring de la Espriella's
