U.S. elections from Alaska to Maine will reverberate globally next week, as midterm voting promises to diminish a president who has strong-armed the world.

With polls suggesting Donald Trump’s Republican Party will lose control of at least one house of Congress, conventional political wisdom would dictate that the 80-year-old leader emerges a lame duck, his predilection for deploying trade tariffs and U.S. military power curbed.

That might not transpire, given this is Trump. Heading into the final two years of his term, the U.S. president may instead take electoral defeat at home as a cue to step up his interventions abroad, renewing his attacks on Iran, attempting to force Ukraine to bow to Russian demands, or revisiting global tariffs.

“He could easily accelerate his agenda,” said Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation in Singapore. “Extremely angry” after the elections, “he will be looking for an opportunity to continue to show leadership in the way that he thinks is important, and so I do think that he will aggressively pursue his trade agenda.”

Yet, there are signs that his allure may already have peaked, with ramifications for politics and business, investors and voters worldwide. A slew of recent elections that have gone against his international allies is just one indication of a tentative pivot away from global Trumpism.

In the clearest repudiation of Trump’s influence, Brazilian voters last Sunday wrong-footed analysts and market expectations to rally behind veteran leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for an historic fourth term.

In doing so, they not only rebuffed right-wing candidate Flávio Bolsonaro — the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, known as the Trump of the Tropics — but defied Trump’s push to assert U.S. dominance over Latin America. Lula campaigned on sovereignty, asserting that Brazil was nobody’s backyard. Flávio Bolsonaro wound up fleeing to Florida.

Elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, during a summit in Montreal this week, the European Union and Canada committed to deepen ties in fields from defense and security to education in a demonstration of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “middle power” strategy.

Touting shared values including “democracy, respect for the rules-based international order, and a commitment to free and fair trade,” the EU’s take on the agenda read like an attempt to goad Trump on the eve of his Nov. 3 electoral test.

Foreign leaders are understandably shy of offering opinions on the U.S. elections, whether they share Trump’s playbook or not.

“It’s no secret that the Trump administration has been quite a handful to deal with,” said Dino Djalal, a former Indonesian ambassador to the U.S. He predicted “a rebalancing of U.S. politics” as a result of Democrats’ projected gains that would go some way to easing international tensions and what he called “a climate of fear” in bilateral relations under Trump.

Governments in Asia were among the first to sign trade deals to lower tariffs with the U.S., often including sizable investment packages. It’s not lost on U.S. officials that few if any of these deals have been ratified, enabling governments to seek to run down the clock in the event that Trump emerges enfeebled.

Others are simply hoping the midterms will bring some respite. Among them are South Africa, castigated by Trump and shut out of this year’s U.S.-hosted Group of 20 meetings despite being a permanent member since its inception in 1999.

Ryan Smith, a South African lawmaker and foreign affairs spokesman for the Democratic Alliance, the second-biggest party in the governing coalition, doesn’t expect a Republican defeat to “provide an opportunity for relations to thaw.” Yet “it may turn the administration’s attention inward,” and so help to “take the focus off us a little,” he said.

In another rejection of MAGA-aligned populism, Serbian strongman Aleksandar Vucic — whose acquaintances include Donald Trump Jr. and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner — was unceremoniously (and unexpectedly) ejected last weekend by voters wearied by his long years in office. In his place, they elected a student-led group that tapped into public dismay at institutional corruption.

“Is the air coming out of Europe’s autocrats?” asked German news magazine Der Spiegel, linking Vucic’s demise to that of his fellow Russia-friendly former leader, Viktor Orban of Hungary. Orban, a figure hailed in MAGA circles for his form of self-styled illiberal democracy and baiting of the European Union, was voted out in a landslide for pro-EU candidate Peter Magyar in April.

In the U.K., meanwhile, longtime Trump ally Nigel Farage’s populist anti-EU Reform party has ceded its poll lead to Labour under Prime Minister Andy Burnham, who has pledged to hew closer to the 27-nation bloc, including potentially reversing Brexit. The Brexit referendum of June 2016 in which Farage played a decisive role was the first main point in an arc of populism that led to Trump’s election five months later.

The same drivers in these disparate developments are visible in the U.S. midterms, where one-third of the Senate and the 435-seat House of Representatives are up for grabs: revulsion at corruption; a disaffected youth vote; increasingly unattainable housing; the sense of a lack of perspective in a world where artificial intelligence is upending job prospects, and politicians seemingly powerless or unwilling to intervene; anger at the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran; soaring pump prices due to the conflict.

Overlaying it all is the issue of affordability, the hammer that threatens to crack Trump’s U.S. base. Cost of living was the leading concern in an online survey of more than 60,000 people across 32 countries for the Riyadh-based Future Investment Initiative Institute. Trump’s totemic issue of immigration placed joint sixth along with global warming, according to the FII Priority Compass survey released Oct. 28.

Yet even if the world really has passed peak Trumpism, there is plentiful evidence of an enduring appeal for those values, whatever the outcome of Tuesday’s vote.

Lula is pretty much the last South American leader holding out against Trump’s so-called Donroe Doctrine. In Australia, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party has surged in popularity with Trump-style policies like climate-change denial and opposition to immigration.

Germany’s far-right AfD party, supported by U.S. Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, has the political momentum, while six months from France’s election, anti-immigration stalwart Marine Le Pen stands her best chance of winning the presidency at a fourth attempt. Benjamin Netanyahu is still at the helm in Israel after championing his ties to Trump in the campaign.

For all the international turmoil of the past two years, relations between the U.S. and its chief global rival, China, have stabilized. President Xi Jinping is expected to host Trump at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen in mid-November then travel to the U.S. G-20 in December, after two previous meetings this year.

But competition is never far away. Bloomberg Intelligence sees China leading the world in eight of 17 strategically important technologies by 2030, including the large language models at the core of AI.

China and the rest of the world have a more immediate form of leverage to counter any post-midterm presidential disruption — purchases of U.S. debt. An analysis of Treasury and State Department data by Bloomberg found that U.S. allies including Japan and South Korea bought the lowest level of Treasuries in the first eight months of 2026 in five years.

During a trip to Asia this week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned of “the erosion of an international order” that’s under way. Whatever the nature of the “new geopolitical era” he sees ahead, Merz didn’t see fit to mention Washington’s role in it: He name-checked China and Beijing 15 times without once referring to the U.S. or Trump.

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(With assistance from Philip J. Heijmans, Antony Sguazzin, Alastair Gale and Cedric Sam.)

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