The Election Netanyahu Cannot Lose
The Election Netanyahu Cannot Lose
Israel may hold a lawful election on October 27, count every ballot correctly and certify the result — and still fail to transfer power.
That is the danger now taking shape: not the cancellation of democracy, but its conversion into a procedure whose outcome is legitimate only when Benjamin Netanyahu wins.
No ballots have yet been cast. Nevertheless, Likud has already begun defining the meaning of the result. A Netanyahu victory will represent the will of the people. A Netanyahu defeat will require another explanation: fraud, institutional conspiracy, Arab manipulation, hostile elites or an illegitimate coalition.
The election is being interpreted before it happens.
Likud politicians have repeatedly attacked senior officials of the Central Elections Committee. Dean Livne, its acting director-general, was portrayed as politically biased. When Yifat Siminovski, a specialist in artificial intelligence and cybertechnology, was unanimously appointed as the committee’s legal adviser, Netanyahu and his party challenged both the procedure and her qualifications.
The committee is chaired by Noam Sohlberg, a conservative Supreme Court justice. That detail destroys the convenient claim that Likud is merely defending itself from a left-wing institution. The problem is not the committee’s ideology. The problem is that it remains capable of issuing decisions Netanyahu does not control.
Regional Cooperation Minister David Amsalem has gone further. Before a single vote has been cast, he has already identified where the election will supposedly be falsified: Arab communities and kibbutzim.
A governing party that predicts fraud before an election is not protecting electoral integrity. It is manufacturing an alibi for defeat.
The latest polls explain the urgency. Recent surveys place Netanyahu’s bloc between the high forties and low fifties, well below the 61 seats required for a Knesset majority. Some give the non-Arab opposition an outright majority. Others leave Arab parties holding the balance of power. Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar is running level with or ahead of Likud in several measurements, while Eisenkot leads Netanyahu in some head-to-head questions about suitability for prime minister.
Polls are not results. But they show why Likud’s geography of suspicion is so precise.
If the non-Arab opposition reaches 61 seats, large anti-Netanyahu margins in kibbutzim and other opposition strongholds may remove him. If it falls short, Arab representatives may become indispensable to the formation of a government. Likud has preemptively marked both routes as suspect.
The electoral map is being redrawn as a crime scene.
Arab communities and kibbutzim play different roles in this political construction. Arab voters can be portrayed as citizens whose participation is legally permitted but nationally doubtful. Kibbutzim can be portrayed as strongholds of a hostile elite that has supposedly captured the institutions of the state.
One population is treated as not fully belonging to the people. The other as having illegitimately ruled over them.
Together they produce a geography of suspect citizenship. Some votes appear as the natural voice of the nation. Others enter the count already contaminated by doubt.
This is not simply an accusation that the opposition may receive fraudulent votes. It is an attempt to establish that only Netanyahu’s electorate represents the authentic public.
The second asymmetry concerns evidence. Likud is not excluded from the electoral process. The Central Elections Committee includes representatives of the Knesset factions. Election inspectors will be present across the country, and parts of the counting process are expected to be publicly broadcast.
Likud is therefore not preparing an accusation that greater access or transparency can answer. It is preparing one that no evidence will be permitted to disprove.
Once the committee itself has been declared partisan, every safeguard can be incorporated into the conspiracy. Professional supervision becomes coordinated institutional control. A rejected complaint becomes proof that the committee is biased. Transparency becomes a performance staged by hostile officials.
The allegation no longer has to survive verification. Verification itself becomes suspect.
At that point, an election result ceases to be a common fact. The Central Elections Committee has its count; Likud has another political reality.
This is why the comparison with Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” is necessary but insufficient. Trump tried to overturn a specific defeat by declaring the count fraudulent. The operation now taking shape in Israel reaches beyond the count.
Before the election, the government can shape the informational environment in which political judgment is formed. During the election, Likud can identify suspicious populations and delegitimize the institutions responsible for supervision. After the election, Netanyahu can question not only the accuracy of the numbers, but the political legitimacy of the government those numbers might produce.
The last stage is the most important.
Israelis do not directly elect a prime minister. They elect the Knesset. After the vote, the president consults the parliamentary factions and gives a candidate the opportunity to form a government. The outgoing government remains in office until a new one is established.
Netanyahu can therefore lose the electoral contest without immediately losing power.
If the opposition cannot assemble a coalition, Netanyahu remains prime minister. If its leaders refuse to cooperate with Arab parties, Netanyahu remains prime minister. If coalition negotiations collapse, Netanyahu remains prime minister.
The result can be correct and still fail to remove him.
This is what most discussions of electoral fraud miss. The election does not have to be annulled. It can be emptied of consequence.
A parliamentary majority dependent on Arab representatives offers an especially convenient target. Likud may not need to deny that the votes were counted correctly. It can argue instead that such a coalition does not represent the authentic national will.
The arithmetic is accepted. Its political meaning is rejected.
Arab votes remain inside the result while being excluded from the result’s capacity to govern.
This creates a hierarchy of electoral reality. A Netanyahu victory requires no explanation because it is treated as the direct voice of the people. A non-Arab opposition victory can be attributed to hostile institutions, media manipulation or fraud in opposition strongholds. A majority dependent on Arab parties may be recognized as numerically legal while being denounced as nationally illegitimate.
Only one result arrives uncontaminated.
That is what it means to prepare an election only one leader is allowed to win.
The coalition’s new media legislation belongs to the same structure. It increases government influence over broadcast regulation, audience measurement and the distribution of state advertising while benefiting the pro-government Channel 14.
The significance is not merely that Netanyahu dislikes hostile journalists. The government has altered the informational environment immediately before voters are asked to judge it.
It is shaping not only the interpretation of the result, but the conditions in which the result will be produced.
Formal control of the election administration is not necessary. An institution can be subordinated by making independence dangerous. If every decision unfavorable to Likud is described as proof of political corruption, officials may begin overcompensating in order to demonstrate their neutrality.
The accusation of bias then becomes a method of producing favorable bias.
The same logic can affect participation. Surveillance directed specifically at Arab polling stations does not operate neutrally once Arab citizens have already been identified as potential sources of fraud. Voting becomes an encounter with suspicion.
The allegation can therefore influence the result before any vote is counted. It can intimidate voters, reduce participation and make some citizens feel that their ballots require justification while others vote as the presumed owners of the state.
The operation does not merely prepare an interpretation of defeat. It can help produce the result it claims only to predict.
The opposition must therefore do more than promise that the ballots will be counted honestly. It must defend the legitimacy of every lawful parliamentary majority capable of forming a government, including one dependent on Arab representatives.
Opposition leaders cannot demand Arab turnout and then reproduce Netanyahu’s distinction between votes that may be counted and votes that may govern.
The media also has a responsibility. Repeating an unsupported accusation of fraud as one side of an ordinary political disagreement does not constitute neutrality. It gives institutional standing to a claim designed to destroy the possibility of common verification.
Allegations of fraud or interference, whether made by the government or the opposition, must be treated as factual claims requiring public evidence.
Before election day, every party should be required to make three explicit commitments: to accept the certified result, to respect the institutions administering the election and to recognize the right of any lawful Knesset majority to form a government.
By election night, it may be too late to ask. The meaning of defeat may already have been poisoned.
A leader is not the people. A party is not the state. A parliamentary majority does not become fraudulent because it includes citizens the government would prefer to keep politically powerless.
Losing office is not a coup. An election that removes a prime minister is not defective because it has performed its democratic function.
Netanyahu has spent years describing every limitation on his power as sabotage. Courts sabotage the government. Prosecutors sabotage democracy. Investigators sabotage national unity. Security officials sabotage policy. Protesters sabotage the war effort. Independent media sabotage public judgment.
The same machinery is now approaching the ballot box.
It does not have to prevent the election. It needs only to decide which votes will be treated as authentic, which institutions will be permitted to certify them and which parliamentary majorities will be allowed to take power.
Israel may hold an election, count every ballot and certify the result correctly.
The transfer of power may still be the one result Netanyahu’s political machinery has prepared Israel not to accept.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
