Neymar has returned to Santos, his boyhood club. BBC Sport looks back at his time with Barcelona, PSG and Al-Hilal, and considers what might happen next for Brazil's record scorer.

The Brazilian leader says he is looking for a relationship based on mutual respect after Trump threatens tariffs.

For a moment on Sunday, the government of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro looked like it might be the first in Latin America to take a meaningful stand against President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plans. Instead, Petro gave Trump the perfect opportunity to show how far he would go to enforce compliance. Latin American leaders came out worse off.

On Sunday afternoon, Petro, a leftist who has held office since 2022, announced on X that he would not allow two U.S. military aircraft carrying Colombian deportees to land. He forced them to turn back mid-flight and demanded that Trump establish a protocol for treating deportees with dignity.

Colombia had quietly accepted military deportation flights before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Financial Times. But the Trump administration began flaunting these flights publicly, and some deportees sent to Brazil claimed that they were shackled, denied water, and beaten. Petro saw all of this as a step too far, and reacted. He clarified that he would still accept deportations carried out via “civilian aircraft,” without treating migrants “like criminals” (more than 120 such flights landed in Colombia last year).

Trump responded by threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods (to be raised to 50 percent within a week), impose emergency banking sanctions, and bar entry to all Colombian-government officials and even their “allies.” The message was clear: To get his way on deportations, he would stop at nothing, even if this meant blowing up relations with one of the United States’ closest Latin American partners.

[Quico Toro: Trump’s Colombia spat is a gift to China]

Petro almost immediately backed down. He seemed to have taken the stand on a whim, possibly in part to distract from a flare-up in violence among armed criminal groups inside his country. The White House announced that Colombia had agreed to accept deportation flights, including on military aircraft. Petro gave a tepid repost, then deleted it.

For Trump, the incident was a perfect PR stunt, allowing him to showcase the maximum-pressure strategy he might use against any Latin American government that openly challenges his mass-deportation plans and offering a test case for whether tariffs can work to coerce cooperation from U.S. allies. For Latin America, the ordeal could not have come at a worse time.

Across the region, leaders are bracing for the impact of deportations—not only of their own citizens, but of “third-country nationals” such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, whose governments often refuse to take them back. They are rightfully worried about what a sudden influx of newcomers and a decline in remittance payments from the United States will mean for their generally slow-growing economies, weak formal labor markets, and strained social services, not to mention public safety, given the tendency of criminal gangs to kidnap and forcibly recruit vulnerable recent deportees.

If Latin American governments are trying to negotiate the scope or scale of deportation behind closed doors, they do not appear to be having much success. Several leaders seem to be losing their nerve. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, went from expressing hope for an agreement with the Trump administration to receive only Mexicans to accepting the continued deportation of noncitizens—perhaps because Trump threatened to place 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican goods as soon as February 1. Honduras threatened to expel a U.S. Air Force base on January 3 if the United States carried on with its deportation plans. By January 27, Honduras folded, saying that it would accept military deportation flights but requesting that deportees not be shackled. Guatemala is trying to draw the line at taking in only fellow Central Americans.

Most Latin American leaders will bend to Trump’s wishes on mass deportation rather than invite the strong-arm tactics he threatened to use on Colombia. One reason is that tariffs can really hurt the countries whose cooperation Trump needs most on deportations. Unlike most of South America, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador still trade more with the United States than with China. Only with Mexico, the United States’ largest trade partner, does the leverage go both ways, but even there it is sharply asymmetrical (more than 80 percent of Mexican exports go to the U.S., accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP).

Latin American countries could improve their bargaining position by taking a unified stand and negotiating with Trump as a bloc. But the chances that they will do so are slim and getting slimmer. Today, Honduran President Xiomara Castro called off a planned meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a left-leaning regional bloc, to discuss migration, faulting a “lack of consensus.”

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

Latin American presidents have relatively weak incentives to fight Trump on migration. The region is home to more than 20 million displaced people, millions of whom reside as migrants or refugees in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere—and yet, migration is simply not that big of a diplomatic political issue in most countries. That could change if deportations reach a scale sufficient to rattle economies, but Latin American leaders are focused on the short term, much as Trump is. Presidential approval ratings tend to rise and fall based on crime and the economy more than immigration, and at least for now, anti-U.S. nationalism is not the political force it has been in the past.

So Trump will likely get his way in more cases than not. But he shouldn’t celebrate just yet, because the short-term payoff of strong-arming Latin America will come at the long-term cost of accelerating the region’s shift toward China and increasing its instability. The latter tends, sooner or later, to boomerang back into the United States.

“Every South American leader, even pro-American ones, will look at Trump’s strategy vis-à-vis Panama, Colombia, and Mexico and understand the risks of being overly dependent on the U.S. right now. The majority will seek to diversify their partnerships to limit their exposure to Trump,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian international-relations analyst, posted on X in the middle of the Colombia standoff. He’s right. Latin American leaders, even several conservative ones, moved closer to China during Trump’s first term, which is not what Trump wants. Reducing China’s presence in Latin America seems to be his No. 2 priority in the region (see his threats to Panama over the Hong Kong company operating near its canal). Chinese investments in dual-use infrastructure and 5G technology pose long-term national-security risks to the United States. But Trump’s tariff threats and coercion could rattle Latin America and help China make its sales pitch to the region: We’re the reliable ones. The long-standing lament that Latin American conservatives, centrists, and leftists share is that whereas the United States comes to the region to punish and lecture, China comes to trade. Trump’s current approach gives that complaint extra credence.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

Trump’s deportation plans threaten to destabilize parts of Latin America, which will have repercussions for the United States. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of people to countries without the economic or logistical capacity to absorb them could leave the region reeling. Consider that the Trump administration is negotiating an asylum agreement with El Salvador—a country with one of the weakest and smallest economies, and highest rates of labor informality, in all of Central America. If Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans are sent there, they are almost guaranteed not to find jobs. People deported to Honduras and Guatemala will also likely struggle to find work and face recruitment by gangs. And because remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Guatemala and about a quarter in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, large-scale deportations threaten to deliver a brutal shock to their economies. Mexico’s economy is bigger and sturdier, but economists have shown that large influxes of deportees there, too, tend to depress formal-sector wages and increase crime. The inflow of workers might still benefit economies like Mexico’s in the long run. But in the short to medium term, Trump’s mass-deportation plans are a recipe for instability.

The lesson of the past several decades—Trump’s first term included—is that Latin American instability never remains contained within the region. It inevitably comes boomeranging back to the United States. Mexican cartels didn’t gain far-reaching influence just in their country. They fueled a fentanyl epidemic that has killed more than a quarter million Americans since 2018. Venezuela’s economic collapse under authoritarian rule didn’t bring misery only upon that country; it produced one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, with more than half a million Venezuelans fleeing to the United States. Instability nowhere else in the world affects the United States more directly, or profoundly, than that in Latin America.

In the 1980s and ’90s, internal armed conflicts raged in Colombia and Central America, and Mexico confronted serial economic crises. Since then, the United States’ immediate neighbors have become relatively more stable, democratic, and prosperous. But slow growth, fiscal imbalances, and, above all, the growing power of organized crime have tested that stability in recent years. Trump is adding to the pressure with mass deportations—then hoping to contain whatever erupts by simply hardening the southern border. That’s quite the gamble.

A second Trump administration was sure to come down hard on whichever Latin American country first defied it—few in the region expected otherwise. But Colombia was perhaps the United States’ most steadfast friend in South America, and the speed with which a 100-year relationship seemed to crumble last night was frightening.

Or perhaps exhilarating, if you were a Chinese diplomat in Latin America observing the presidential spat.

First, Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, refused to allow U.S.-military deportation flights that were already airborne to land in his country. Petro balked at reports of migrants arriving handcuffed and said that Colombia would allow such flights only if deportees were treated with “dignity and respect.” President Donald Trump’s response—grossly disproportionate—was to threaten tariffs, visa restrictions, and even banking sanctions against a strategic U.S. ally. The two countries worked out a late-night deal that seems to have averted a crisis, but the speed of escalation left much of Latin American unnerved.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

If Americans are under the impression that Trump’s penchant for reckless, heat-of-the-moment policy making is unique, they don’t have the measure of Gustavo Petro. Colombia’s radical left-wing president has appalled friends and foes alike with X tiffs and stunts such as repeatedly tagging a parody account for his defense minister and amplifying false rumors that Colombian kids lost in the Amazon jungle had been found. Some of his posts come across as just plain bonkers—such as the one he wrote to Trump in the middle of yesterday’s crisis.

At 4:15 p.m. on Sunday, diplomats were working furiously behind the scenes to smooth over the rift between the two presidents when Petro hit back with a long, incoherent rant. Starting with a curt dismissal of tourism in the U.S. as “boring,” the missive went everywhere: Petro slammed American racism, asserted his refusal to “shake hands with white slavers,” and celebrated Walt Whitman. He also recalled the U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup against Chile’s leftist president Salvador Allende, celebrated Colombia’s putative roots in the caliphate of Córdoba, and protested the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, a Coolidge-era U.S. scandal involving the supposed racial profiling of two Italian American anarchists. In other words, at a moment of peril for his country, Colombia’s president posted a word salad—and then pinned it to the top of his X account.

The moment called for careful diplomacy, not a fit of pique. In Brazil, where the mistreatment of deportees on U.S. military flights had already caused controversy, Colombia’s spat narrowed the Brazilian government’s room for maneuver still further. And throughout the region, governments struggling to figure out what to do with large numbers of deportees found themselves staring into the abyss: Most Latin American governments do not like how the U.S. government is behaving but cannot afford a trade war with Uncle Sam.

Or can they? Zoom out a bit and one might wonder. The era of uncontested U.S. leadership in the region is fading fast in the rearview mirror. These days, China provides an obvious alternative to the United States in the realms of trade, finance, and technology. In fact, most of South America—including big countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru—now trades more with China than with the United States. If you exclude Mexico, Chinese trade now dwarfs American trade in the region.

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

After Trump was reelected, discussion in the region centered on how to balance growing Chinese influence with existing ties with the United States. Most countries were of a mind to try to stay neutral between the two powers and maintain good relations with both Washington and Beijing. Countless university seminars agonized over what a war in the Taiwan Strait would mean for Latin America: No country in the region would want to take sides, though many recognized that they might not have a choice. All along, the assumption tended to be that a crisis that started outside Latin America would have repercussions within it. What few at the time foresaw was that the region could be delivered to China through Trump’s sheer impetuosity, or his inability to think before posting.

For now, Trumpian aggression has won the day: U.S. and Colombian diplomats—who know each other well and are used to collaborating closely—had little trouble finding a compromise to de-escalate the crisis. That de-escalation can be expected to last about as long as the two countries’ intemperate presidents manage to stay off X.

But for excellent historical reasons, Latin Americans hate being dictated to by gringos and won’t support leaders who meekly allow it. Trump’s hyper-aggressive approach to Latin America risks tying up the region with a bow and leaving it on Beijing’s doorstep. Most Latin American leaders will resist a decisive break with Washington—the U.S. is still too important a trade and diplomatic partner to antagonize just for kicks. But Latin American leaders will not wish to be seen submitting passively to the United States in full imperialist mode. Not when the Chinese embassy is just one phone call away.

During an American election, a rich man can hand out $1 million checks to prospective voters. Companies and people can use secretly funded “dark money” nonprofits to donate unlimited money, anonymously, to super PACs, which can then spend it on advertising campaigns. Pod­casters, partisans, or anyone, really, can tell outrageous, incendiary lies about a candidate. They can boost those falsehoods through targeted online advertising. No special courts or election rules can stop the disinformation from spreading before voters see it. The court of public opinion, which over the past decade has seen and heard everything, no longer cares. U.S. elections are now a political Las Vegas: Anything goes.

But that’s not the way elections are run in other countries. In Britain, political parties are, at least during the run-up to an election, limited to spending no more than £54,010 per candidate. In Germany, as in many other European countries, the state funds political parties, proportionate to their number of elected parliamentarians, so that politicians do not have to depend on, and become corrupted by, wealthy donors. In Poland, courts fast-track election-­related libel cases in the weeks before a vote in order to discourage people from lying.

Nor is this unique to Europe. Many democracies have state or public media that are obligated, at least in principle, to give equal time to all sides. Many require political donations to be transparent, with the names of donors listed in an online registry. Many have limits on political advertising. Some countries also have rules about hate speech and indict people who break them.

Countries apply these laws to create conditions for fair debate, to build trust in the system, and to inspire confidence in the winning candidates. Some democracies believe that transparency matters—­that voters should know who is funding their candidates, as well as who is paying for political messages on social media or anywhere else. In some places, these rules have a loftier goal: to prevent the rise of anti­democratic extremism of the kind that has engulfed democracies—­and especially European democracies—­­in the past.

But for how much longer can democracies pursue these goals? We live in a world in which algorithms controlled by American and Chinese oligarchs choose the messages and images seen by millions of people; in which money can move through secret bank accounts with the help of crypto schemes; and in which this dark money can then boost anonymous social-media accounts with the aim of shaping public opinion. In such a world, how can any election rules be enforced? If you are Albania, or even the United Kingdom, do you still get to set the parameters of your public debate? Or are you now forced to be Las Vegas too?

Although it’s easy to get distracted by the schoolyard nicknames and irresponsible pedophilia accusations that Elon Musk flings around, these are the real questions posed by his open, aggressive use of X to spread false information and promote extremist and anti-European politicians in the U.K., Germany, and elsewhere. The integrity of elections—­and the possibility of debate untainted by misinformation injected from abroad—is equally challenged by TikTok, the Chinese platform, and by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, whose subsidiaries include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads. TikTok says the company does not accept any paid political advertising. Meta, which announced in January that it is abandoning fact-checking on its sites in the U.S., also says it will continue to comply with European laws. But even before Zucker­berg’s radical policy change, these promises were empty. Meta’s vaunted content curation and moderation have never been transparent. Nobody knew, and nobody knows, what exactly Facebook’s algorithm was promoting and why. Even an occasional user of these platforms encounters spammers, scammers, and opaque accounts running foreign influence operations. No guide to the algorithm, and no real choices about it, are available on Meta products, X, or TikTok.

In truth, no one knows if any platforms really comply with political-funding rules either, because nobody outside the companies can fully monitor what happens online during an intense election campaign—and after the voting has ended, it’s too late. According to declassified Romanian-intelligence documents, someone allegedly spent more than $1 million on TikTok content in the 18 months before an election in support of a Romanian presidential candidate who declared that he himself had spent nothing at all. In a belated attempt to address this and other alleged discrepancies, a Romanian court canceled the first round of that election, a decision that itself damaged Romanian democracy.

Not all of this is new. Surreptitious political-party funding was a feature of the Cold War, and the Russian government has continued this practice, sometimes by offering deals to foreign business­people close to pro-Russian politicians. Press moguls with international political ambitions are hardly a novelty. Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who has U.S. citizenship, has long played an outsize role in U.K. politics through his media companies. John Major, the former British prime minister and Conservative Party leader, has said that in 1997, Murdoch threatened to pull his newspapers’ support unless the prime minister pursued a more anti-­European policy. Major refused. Murdoch has said, “I have never asked a prime minister for anything,” but one of his Conservative-­leaning tabloids, The Sun, did endorse the Labour Party in the next election. Major lost.

That incident now seems almost quaint. Even at the height of its influence, the print edition of The Sun sold 4 million copies a day. More to the point, it operated, and still does, within the constraints of U.K. rules and regulations, as do all broadcast and print media. Murdoch’s newspapers take British libel and hate-speech laws into consideration when they run stories. His business strategy is necessarily shaped by rules limiting what a single company can own. After his journalists were accused of hacking phones and bribing police in the early 2000s, Murdoch himself had to testify before an investigative commission, and he closed down one of his tabloids for good.

[McKay Coppins: Europe braces for Trump]

Social media not only has far greater reach—Musk’s personal X account has more than 212 million followers, giving him enormous power to set the news agenda around the world—it also exists outside the legal system. Under the American law known as Section 230, passed nearly three decades ago, internet platforms are not treated as publishers in the U.S. In practice, neither Facebook nor X has the same legal responsibility for what appears on their platforms as do, say, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. And this, too, has consequences: Americans have created the information climate that other countries must accept, and this allows deceptive election practices to thrive. If countries don’t have their own laws, and until recently most did not, Section 230 effectively requires them to treat social-media companies as if they exist outside their legal systems too.

Brazil broke with this pattern last year, when a judge demanded that Musk comply with Brazilian laws against spreading misinformation and political extremism, and forced X offline until he did. Several European countries, including the U.K., Germany, and France, have also passed laws designed to bring the platforms into compliance with their own legal systems, mandating fines for companies that violate hate-speech laws or host other illegal content. But these laws are controversial and hard to enforce. Besides, “illegal speech” is not necessarily the central problem. No laws prevented Musk from interviewing Alice Weidel, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, on X, thereby providing her with a huge platform, available to no other political candidate, in the month before a national election. The interview, which included several glaringly false statements (among others, that Weidel was the “leading” candidate), was viewed 45 million times in 24 hours, a number far beyond the reach of any German public or private media.

Only one institution on the planet is large enough and powerful enough to write and enforce laws that could make the tech companies change their policies. Partly for that reason, the European Union may soon become one of the Trump administration’s most prominent targets. In theory, the EU’s Digital Services Act, which took full effect last year, can be used to regulate, fine, and, in extreme circumstances, ban internet companies whose practices clash with European laws. Yet a primary intent of the act is not punitive, but rather to open up the platforms: to allow vetted researchers access to platform data, and to give citizens more transparency about what they hear and see. Freedom of speech also means the right to receive information, and at the moment social-media companies operate behind a curtain. We don’t know if they are promoting or suppressing certain points of view, curbing or encouraging orchestrated political campaigns, discouraging or provoking violent riots. Above all, we don’t know who is paying for misinformation to be spread online.

In the past, the EU has not hesitated to try to apply European law to tech companies. Over the past decade, for example, Google has faced three fines totaling more than $8 billion for breaking antitrust law (though one of these fines was overturned by the EU’s General Court in 2024).

In November, the European Commission fined Meta more than $800 million for unfair trade practices. But for how much longer will the EU have this authority? In the fall, J. D. Vance issued an extraordinarily unsubtle threat, one that is frequently repeated in Europe. “If NATO wants us to continue supporting them and NATO wants us to continue to be a good participant in this military alliance,” Vance told an interviewer, “why don’t you respect American values and respect free speech?” Mark Zuckerberg, echoing Vance’s misuse of the expression free speech to mean “freedom to conceal company practices from the public,” put it even more crudely. In a conversation with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg said he feels “optimistic” that President Donald Trump will intervene to stop the EU from enforcing its own antitrust laws: “I think he just wants America to win.”

Does America “winning” mean that European democracies, and maybe other democracies, lose? Some European politicians think it might. Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and a leader of that country’s Green Party, believes that Musk’s frenzies of political activity on X aren’t the random blurts of an addled mind, but rather are “logical and systematic.” In his New Year’s address, Habeck said that Musk is deliberately “strengthening those who are weakening Europe,” including the explicitly anti-European AfD. This, he believes, is because “a weak Europe is in the interest of those for whom regulation is an inappropriate limitation of their power.”

Until recently, Russia was the most important state seeking to undermine European institutions. Vladimir Putin has long disliked the EU because it restricts Russian companies’ ability to intimidate and bribe European political leaders and companies, and because the EU is larger and more powerful than Russia, whereas European countries on their own are not. Now a group of American oligarchs also want to undermine European institutions, because they don’t want to be regulated—and they may have the American president on their side. Quite soon, the European Union, along with Great Britain and other democracies around the world, might find that they have to choose between their alliance with the United States and their ability to run their own elections and select their own leaders without the pressure of aggressive outside manipulation. Ironically, countries, such as Brazil, that don’t have the same deep military, economic, and cultural ties to the U.S. may find it easier to maintain the sovereignty of their political systems and the transparency of their information ecosystems than Europeans.

A crunch point is imminent, when the European Commission finally concludes a year-long investigation into X. Tellingly, two people who have advised the commission on this investigation would talk with me only off the record, because the potential for reprisals against them and their organizations—­whether it be online trolling and harassment or lawsuits—­is too great. Still, both advisers said that the commission has the power to protect Europe’s sovereignty, and to force the platforms to be more transparent. “The commission should look at the raft of laws and rules it has available and see how they can be applied,” one of them told me, “always remembering that this is not about taking action against a person’s voice. This is the commission saying that everyone’s voice should be equal.”

At least in theory, no country is obligated to become an electoral Las Vegas, as America has. Global democracies could demand greater transparency around the use of algorithms, both on social media and in the online-advertising market more broadly. They could offer consumers more control over what they see, and more information about what they don’t see. They could enforce their own campaign-funding laws. These changes could make the internet more open and fair, and therefore a better, safer place for the exercise of free speech. If the chances of success seem narrow, it’s not because of the lack of a viable legal framework—­rather it’s because, at the moment, cowardice is as viral as one of Musk’s tweets.

This article appears in the March 2025 print edition with the headline “Can Europe Stop Elon Musk?”

The beginning of I’m Still Here is a careful trap. In the first 20 minutes of his new film, the director Walter Salles introduces the Paiva family, a vibrant Brazilian clan based in Rio de Janeiro. It’s 1970, and we watch the seven family members—Eunice (played by Fernanda Torres), Rubens (Selton Mello), and their five kids—eat, chatter, hit the beach, and go dancing. Their bond feels palpably warm and realistic, a comforting lull that Salles is tempting the audience into. Despite knowing that the story is based on wrenching, real-life events, I started to hope against hope that maybe nothing too plotty would happen—that instead, I would just get to spend a couple of hours with this lovely, buzzing unit.

But the vaguest sense of political instability hums in the background of the Paivas’ sandy idyll. In 1964, a military coup overthrew Brazil’s populist democracy, in which Rubens had served as a left-wing congressman. Nearly seven years on, the country is still under martial law. One day, as Eunice and Rubens are playing backgammon and sorting through old photos, the police knock on the door; they curtly take Rubens away for questioning. “I’ll be back for the soufflé,” he tells his wife calmly. In retrospect, it’s the most devastating line in the movie: He won’t see her or their children ever again.

What happened to Rubens Paiva is well known in Brazil. Rubens was one of many citizens disappeared by the country’s military dictatorship over the 21-year regime—suspected Communists the military whisked away, never to return. The government admitted to Rubens’s death at its hands only decades after the fact, and his body still hasn’t been found. His case became particularly notorious because of Eunice’s years-long efforts to draw attention to it: She became a well-known human-rights lawyer, campaigning for victims of political repression. But what happened to Rubens is still a matter of controversy in a country where far-right politicians, until recently, held power.

[Read: The Golden Globes got a little weird with it]

Salles could have taken a blunt, agitprop approach to rendering these events, primarily devoting the film’s screen time to Eunice’s fight for recognition. But the director avoids framing I’m Still Here as an “inspirational true story” focused on Eunice’s legal career; plenty of good articles and books have been written about it. Instead, he confines that information to a few title cards that roll before the end credits. Salles’s take on the Paivas’ saga is subtler and, in my opinion, more successful than this manner of biopic. He creates a quieter sort of historical drama that lives in the aftermath of Rubens’s disappearance, a situation that sometimes feels eerily ordinary. By highlighting Eunice’s role as a parent, Salles pushes viewers toward considering the mundanity of living under a dictatorship—and the gnawing nightmare of lacking control in the face of obvious evil. The years roll on for Eunice and the children, but their everyday bickering or meal prep becomes defined by an absence.

That unsettling feeling is communicated by Torres’s devastating, genuine performance. She won a surprising but well-deserved Golden Globe earlier this month—a shocker not only because I’m Still Here is relatively small-scale, but also because Torres’s work is light on the histrionics that often draw in awards votes. Following their initial visit, armed men then take Eunice and her second-eldest daughter to a mysterious location, where they’re interrogated about both Rubens and their own Communist ties. Eunice remains imprisoned for almost two weeks before she’s released without much explanation; she returns home and immediately tries her best to project an air of normalcy. All the while, Eunice is looking for answers as to her husband’s whereabouts. The kids are old enough to be aware of their family’s ordeal, but their shared anxiety doesn’t affect the restrained atmosphere. Much of what occurs from then on feels sweetly, almost dully relatable.

I’m Still Here’s thoughtful perspective has resonated in Brazil, where it has become the highest-grossing domestic film since the coronavirus pandemic. Acclaim for Salles’s diligent, low-key filmmaking dates back to his international breakthrough, 1998’s Central Station; its star (and Torres’s mother) Fernanda Montenegro received a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Salles has continued to favor a muted tack throughout his career—even when making a Hollywood horror movie, such as the largely forgotten (and somewhat underrated) Dark Water.

[Read: A novel in which nightmares are too real]

Perhaps adding to the local hype for I’m Still Here is that it marks the end of Salles’s directorial hiatus. His last effort, an underwhelming adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, premiered back in 2012. I’m Still Here is a very worthy comeback, and certainly his strongest work since 2004’s The Motorcycle Diaries, a portrayal of Che Guevara’s early years touring Latin America. That film, like this one, wore its political message on its sleeve without overdoing it. Salles hasn’t always nailed this delicate balance (again, his rather limp On the Road), but in this case, it pays off beautifully.

I’m Still Here’s most impressive magic trick, though, is a piece of meta-casting near its conclusion. The timeline leaps forward to the year 2014, introducing the 95-year-old Montenegro as the older version of Eunice. What happens during these closing moments is as tempered and straightforward as everything that precedes them: The action boils down to a few feelings vaguely flickering across Eunice’s face—but that’s all Salles needs to deliver a final emotional hammer blow.

The passport of Jair Bolsonaro, a former far-right president, had been confiscated as part of ongoing investigations.

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Brazilian attorney general says that Meta's move to loosen curbs on hate speech may put it at odds with country's laws.

Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.