Israel’s count is at 97%, and the arithmetic is almost comic. Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats, Eisenkot’s has 48, and 61 is the number. The 19 seats that Arab-led parties are on course to win, their most ever, sit in between. All but one of the Jewish parties have pledged not to work with them. So the biggest bloc in the room is also the one nobody will admit to needing, and the deciding votes may come from 480,000 absentee ballots from soldiers, diplomats and hospital patients. A record turnout, and the result may hinge on the people who couldn’t get to a polling station.

I’ve been watching how this election was framed all week as a referendum on one man. It may end up as a referendum on a rule nobody wrote down: that some voters count for the total but not for the coalition. Pledges like that tend to hold right up until someone needs 61.

Meanwhile, Flávio Bolsonaro lost to Lula on Sunday and surfaced in Miami, after Brazil cancelled his passports in a criminal investigation and the US issued visas anyway. Trump said “we gave him a pass.” He insists he didn’t flee Brazil, he “left for the sake of Brazil,” which is a sentence that sounds better the less you picture it.

Compare Vučić three days ago, saying the sentence and staying put. Conceding and leaving the country are different ways of losing.

And Spain has begun three days of mourning, with audio suggesting a train was cleared to move while another sat stalled up ahead. I don’t have anything clever to say about that one.

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