Earlier this year, Yonatan Levi left his home country of Israel to observe the Hungarian elections. Levi, a scholar at the center-left think tank Molad, had traveled with a group of lawmakers and activists to investigate how opposition leader Péter Magyar was running a victory campaign against the incumbent prime minister.
This was, in their opinion, an important mission before their own elections this year. Levi and his colleagues see, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a kindred spirit to the defeated Hungarian dictator. Israel is “not yet the Hungary of the Middle East,” Levi says. But, he added, “it’s getting closer.”
Indeed, the opposition parties are bent on ousting Netanyahu – and defending democracy is central to their campaign.
Americans know, and generally dislikeNetanyahu according to his foreign policy: violence in Gaza or the latest influence of Iran’s destructive war. But inside Israel, Netanyahu’s opponents are motivated more by domestic issues: specifically, fears that his ultimate goal is to dismantle Israel’s remaining democratic institutions and stay in power indefinitely.
This is a valid concern. Netanyahu’s government has appointed aides to the Israeli administration safety services, persecuted the Arab minority, to be tortured left wing activistsand pushed legislation that would put courts under his control. He is currently on trial for corruption – and the most serious charges stem from the scheme business regulatory preference for good news coverage from the main center of Israel. President Donald Trump is actively pressuring Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who holds the most ceremonial post, give him forgiveness.
Netanyahu’s tactics come straight from the playbook Viktor Orbán used to hold power in Hungary for nearly 20 years – and the two leaders. get to know each other well. As in the United States, Orbán’s Hungary has become a staple of Israeli public discourse: a figurehead for the center-left and an aspirational figure for the Netanyahu-leaning right.
“I’ve never seen a foreign election covered so closely (in the Israeli media) – except for the US election,” Levi says.
For now, Israelis expect the same result. Vote show up regularly that Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for all but one year since 2009, would lose his leadership majority if elections were held now – and they must be held before October. If this trend holds, then there is a real chance that he will be the next leader in the global right wing supported by Trump to fall.
How Netanyahu could lose – and why he wouldn’t
Whenever anyone talks about Israeli democracy, there are at least two big and important stars attached.
The first, of course, are the Palestinians. In the West Bank, they live under Israeli military occupation, unable to vote in Israeli elections and still under strict laws imposed on them by the IDF leadership. And the situation is worse in Gaza.
To the citizens of Israel, Jews and Arabs alike, political life is democratic: Elections are generally free of fraud and opposition parties compete in public under fair conditions. Netanyahu’s authoritarian impulses have often been limited by his small coalitions and poor elections; his Likud party has never enjoyed a victory in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) equal to Orbán’s two-thirds in the Hungarian parliament.
But here’s our second asterisk: Despite Netanyahu’s weakness relative to someone like Orbán, the quality of Israeli democracy has plummeted under his watch.
Although he has not yet compromised the system to the point where it could be considered a form of “competitive authoritarianism” – the political science term for Hungary under Orbán – his attacks on the judiciary and the protection of minority rights have undermined its foundations. Dahlia Scheindlin, a prominent Israeli political scientist and pollster, describes the country as only “partially” democratic for its citizens – although she admits it is still “nowhere near Hungary” in terms of authoritarian corruption.
Members like Levi reflect a level of concern among Netanyahu’s opponents: They believe that, with more time in office, Netanyahu could further entrench himself in power. While Hungary’s opposition may have just dug itself out of a competitive authoritarian pit, its Israeli counterparts hope to never be in it in the first place.
So what are the odds of hitting Grandma?
The short answer is that their chances are good, but far from certain. To understand why, you need to understand the deep divisions in Israeli politics.
Currently, Netanyahu’s ruling coalition controls most of the seats in the Knesset. The future is not bright: Opinion polls currently show, and have shown for several years, that the five parties in his coalition are likely to lose most seats in the next election. Unless the numbers change dramatically, Netanyahu is unlikely to remain prime minister without adding new parties to his coalition.
The opposition is in better shape. As in Hungary, a broad coalition of Jewish parties from the center-left to the right have come to see Netanyahu as a threat to the vitality of Israeli democracy – campaigning against him and his coalition in effect. Opinion polls show these parties, together, are close to winning a majority (61 seats) in the Knesset.
“Now it is the Zionists, the nationalist liberals against the people who believe that Israel should not be a democracy, and we are the majority,” Yair Lapid, leader of the radical Yesh Atid group, said. he told the Times of Israel. “The election will be about this, and the next government will show this majority.”
Netanyahu has sought to position himself as an irreplaceable wartime leader who can defend the country and navigate difficult international politics, especially relations with Trump’s Washington. His critics have argued, often attacking him from the right, that failed to prevent the October 7 attacks and he hasn’t dealt with decisively by Iran.
However, it is not clear whether this anti-Netanyahu coalition has the ability to bring about meaningful change in the issues that Americans tend to care about most in Israeli politics: The government’s treatment of the Palestinians and its military conflicts with the region’s neighbors.
The country’s center of gravity is on the right. The party that polled the best is led by Naftali Bennett, a former prime minister who began his career with from Netanyahu to the right on both the Palestinian conflict and judicial independence. Although it seems Bennett’s promises have changed somewhat by the political windshe is still the same man – and an alliance based on him would be greatly stimulated by his influence.
The ideological structure of the opposition is not only a major problem in the event of an opposition victory, but in some ways an obstacle to them winning in the first place.
There is a third group beyond these two main Jewish party blocs: the Arab parties, which are expected to control around 11 or 12 Knesset seats. These groups are strongly opposed to Netanyahu; an alliance between the Ra’am Arab party and Jewish groups opposing Bibi he briefly fired Netanyahu in 2021 (and made Bennett prime minister).
However, at the same time, there is resistance from the right side of the opposition to form a government with the support of the Arabs. Bennett has it is expressly forbidden to do so. It is a decision based on the political cost he paid for that last collaboration between his right-wing camp, and the feeling that the rise of hatred against Arabs after October 7 would make that cost even greater in the future.
“There are many Israelis – I say this with great regret – who believe that the 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, a more fundamental problem in Israeli democracy.
Without the support of the Arab parties, the opposition may lack a sufficient majority. If that happens, and Bennett or other potential coalition members still refuse to cut the deal with the Arabs, the most likely outcome is that Netanyahu remains prime minister. So there could be a standoff – where Netanyahu stays in office until another election – or else a breakup of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, where one of the right-wing factions breaks away from a prime minister they once described as an authoritarian threat.
This short-term political problem reflects, at its core, a more fundamental problem in Israeli democracy.
Most Israeli Jews want to live in a democracy, but they also (for now) want to see Arab Israelis excluded and Palestinians oppressed. But this is not a possible balance. Ultimately, Israeli Jews will have to find accommodation with the Palestinians or else abandon democracy altogether. The Netanyahu-based right has moved toward the latter solution, while his main Jewish opponents have (for the most part) rejected the former or refused to seriously pursue it.
The upcoming election, then, is becoming a double test of Israeli democracy: how it has withstood the immediate threat from Netanyahu’s Orbánism, and whether it is capable of dealing with the structural chaos that produced it.
As part of the fading pro-peace camp in Israel, Levi, a Moladi scholar, hopes for a revival. He thought the Hungarian opposition leader Magyar won in part because he refused to allow Orbán to limit the debate and emphasize his own point – in this case, the economy and corruption. With more confidence, perhaps the Israelis who left can one day defeat the “Little Lady in every Israeli politician” and change the terms of the negotiations themselves.
But, for now, what unites most voters is stopping Netanyahu. Victory now sets the stage for further struggles to come.
