Netanyahu may finally be in trouble

Earlier this year, Yonatan Levi left his home country of Israel to observe the Hungarian election. Levi, a scholar at the center-left think tank Molad, had traveled with a group of parliamentarians and activists to study how opposition leader Péter Magyar was running a winning campaign against an authoritarian prime minister.

This was, in their view, a vital mission ahead of their own elections this year. Levi and his colleagues see, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a kindred spirit to Hungary’s defeated autocrat. Israel “is not the Middle East’s Hungary yet,” Levi says. But, he added, “it’s getting closer and closer.” 

Indeed, opposition parties are bullish on taking down Netanyahu — and defending democracy is central to their campaign.

Americans know, and generally dislike, Netanyahu based on his foreign policy: the brutality in Gaza or more recent lobbying for the ruinous Iran war. But inside Israel, Netanyahu’s opponents are most animated by domestic issues: specifically, a fear that his ultimate aim is to demolish Israel’s remaining democratic institutions and stay in power indefinitely.

This is a reasonable concern. Netanyahu’s government has put cronies in charge of Israel’s security services, demonized the Arab minority, persecuted left-wing activists, and pushed legislation that would put the judiciary under his control. He is currently on trial for corruption — with the most serious charges stemming from a scheme to trade regulatory favors for favorable news coverage from a major Israeli outlet. President Donald Trump is actively pushing Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who holds a more ceremonial position, to grant him a pardon.

Netanyahu’s tactics come directly from the playbook Viktor Orbán used to hold power in Hungary for nearly 20 years — and the two leaders know each other well. So much like in the United States, Orbán’s Hungary has become a major part of Israeli public discourse: a boogeyman for the center-left and an aspirational model for the Netanyahu-aligned right. 

“I’ve never seen a foreign election being covered so closely [in the Israeli press] — except for US elections,” Levi says. 

At present, Israelis expect a similar outcome. Polls consistently show that Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for all but one year since 2009, would lose his governing majority if elections were held now — and they’re required to take place no later than October. If these trends hold, then there is a real chance that he will be the next leader in the Trump-aligned far-right international to fall.

How Netanyahu could lose — and why he might not

Whenever anyone talks about Israeli democracy, there are at least two giant and important asterisks attached.

The first, of course, is the Palestinians. In the West Bank, they live under Israeli military occupation, unable to vote in Israeli elections and yet still subject to the harsh rules imposed on them by IDF leadership. And the situation is even worse in Gaza.  

For Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab alike, political life is meaningfully democratic: Elections are generally free of fraud and opposition parties compete openly under relatively fair conditions. Netanyahu’s authoritarian impulses have often been limited by his small-and-rickety electoral coalitions; his Likud party has never enjoyed a margin in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) akin to Orbán’s two-thirds majority in the Hungarian legislature.

Yet here’s our second asterisk: Despite Netanyahu’s weakness relative to someone like Orbán, the quality of Israeli democracy has degraded substantially under his watch.

While he has not yet compromised the system to the point where it can be considered a species of “competitive authoritarianism” — the political science term for Hungary under Orbán — his attacks on the judiciary and minority rights protections have damaged its foundations. Dahlia Scheindlin, a prominent Israeli political scientist and pollster, describes the country as only “very partially” democratic for its citizens — though she admits it still remains “nowhere near Hungary” in levels of authoritarian drift.

Delegations like Levi’s reflect the level of alarm among Netanyahu’s opponents: They believe that, with more time in office, Netanyahu could conceivably further entrench himself in power. While Hungary’s opposition might have just dug itself out of the competitive authoritarian hole, their Israeli peers hope to never be in it in the first place.

So what are their odds of beating Bibi?

The short answer is that their chances are reasonable, but far from guaranteed. To understand why, you need to understand the deeper divisions in Israeli politics.

Currently, Netanyahu’s governing coalition controls a majority of seats in the Knesset. The future is not bright: Polls currently show, and have shown for several years, that the five parties in its coalition are collectively likely to lose quite a few seats in the next election. Unless the numbers change substantially, Netanyahu is unlikely to be able to remain prime minister without adding new parties to his alliance.

The opposition is in better shape. As in Hungary, a broad coalition of Jewish factions ranging from the center-left to the right have come to see Netanyahu as a threat to the very survival of Israeli democracy — campaigning against him and his coalition in existential terms. Polls show these parties as, collectively, right on the cusp of winning a majority (61 seats) in the Knesset.

“It is now Zionist, nationalist liberals against people who believe Israel shouldn’t be a democracy, and we are the majority,” Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid faction, told the Times of Israel. “The elections are going to be about this, and the next government is going to reflect this majority.”

Netanyahu has sought to position himself as an irreplaceable wartime leader who can defend the country and navigate complicated international politics, especially the relationship with Trump’s Washington. His critics have countered, often attacking him from the right, that he failed to stop the October 7 attacks and has not decisively dealt with Iran.

However, it is not clear whether this anti-Netanyahu alliance is capable of delivering meaningful change on the issues Americans tend to care about most in Israeli politics: The government’s treatment of Palestinians and its military conflicts with regional neighbors. 

The country’s center of gravity is well to the right. The best-polling party is led by Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who began his career by outflanking Netanyahu to the right on both the Palestinian conflict and judicial independence. While it seems Bennett’s commitments have shifted somewhat with the political wind, he is still the same person — and a coalition dependent on him would be profoundly shaped by his influence.

The opposition’s ideological makeup is not just a substantive problem in the event of an opposition victory, but in some way a barrier to them winning in the first place.

There is a third grouping beyond these two major Jewish party blocs: the Arab parties, who are projected to control around 11 or 12 Knesset seats. These factions are staunchly anti-Netanyahu; an alliance between the Arab party Ra’am and anti-Bibi Jewish factions briefly ousted Netanyahu in 2021 (and made Bennett prime minister).

Yet at the same time, there is resistance from the rightward flank of the opposition from forming a government with Arab support. Bennett has explicitly ruled out doing so. It’s a decision rooted in the political cost he paid for that last partnership among his right-wing base, and a sense that growing anti-Arab sentiment after October 7 would make that cost even higher in the future.

“There are many Israelis — I say this with great regret — who believe that a government should not be constrained in national security decisions by a party [primarily made up of Arabs],” said Natan Sachs, an expert on Israeli politics at the Middle East Institute.

This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, the deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy.

Without Arab party support, the opposition might very well lack an outright majority. If that happens, and Bennett or other prospective coalition members still refuse to cut a deal with the Arabs, the most likely result is that Netanyahu stays prime minister. So there could be either a deadlock — in which Netanyahu remains in office until another election — or else a fracturing of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, in which one of the right-leaning factions defects to a prime minister they had previously described as an authoritarian menace.

This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, the deeper foundational problem in Israeli democracy.

The majority of Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy, but they also (at present) want it to see Arab Israelis marginalized and Palestinians repressed. But this is not a tenable balance. Eventually, Israeli Jews will have to seek accommodation with Palestinians or else abandon democracy entirely. The Netanyahu-aligned right has moved toward the latter solution, while his leading Jewish opponents have (for the most part) either rejected the former or refused to seriously pursue it.

The next election, then, is shaping up to be a double test of Israeli democracy: how it has weathered the immediate threat from Netanyahu’s Orbánism, and whether it is capable of confronting the structural contradiction that produced it.

As part of the shrunken pro-peace camp in Israel, Levi, the Molad scholar, is hopeful for a revival. He thought Hungary’s opposition leader Magyar won in part because he refused to let Orbán set the term of debate and pressed his own argument — in that case, the economy and corruption. With more confidence, perhaps the Israeli left could one day defeat the “little Bibi inside every Israeli politician’s head” and change the terms of the conversation themselves.

But, for now, what unites the most voters is stopping Netanyahu. A victory now only sets the stage for more fights to come.