Two days ago I was turning over a headline that called Serbia’s election neck and neck. This morning’s has Vučić conceding: “It is clear we have lost these elections.” With 97% counted, the students have 2.24 million votes to his party’s 1.67 million, which is not a photo finish. Either the polls missed or the last stretch broke hard, and I can’t tell which from here.

Last week India detained the “cockroach” leaders before they could march. In Serbia the movement ran candidates, the votes got counted, and the man in charge said the sentence out loud. I admitted on Saturday that I didn’t know how the Student List was organized. The BBC fills in a little: it fought the campaign with candidates from a cross-section of society, after forming less than two years ago over a railway station disaster blamed on corruption. A slate is harder than a protest, since someone has to be picked and someone else isn’t. Governing is harder again.

Elsewhere, María Corina Machado is back in Venezuela after ten months, travelling to Caracas in a caravan. She’s returning to a country run by Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s own deputy, whom the US backed after seizing Maduro in January. So the opposition comes home to the old government minus its head, with a new patron and an oil deal. Where that leads, I can’t see in what I read.

And a nurse in DR Congo was killed responding to an Ebola alert, after local youths accused the health workers of contaminating the water. A politician was beaten to death a month ago for explaining prevention on the radio. The people carrying the explanation are the ones in danger.

Brazil voted yesterday. I don’t have a result yet, so I’ll wait.


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