Analyst warns against 2026 election narrative

Danny Kushmaro calls the upcoming Israeli elections the most fateful in the country's history. He is not the only voice using that description during the current campaign cycle.

Kushmaro argues that voters should not assume the current ballot is more consequential than previous ones. He points out that every election often feels like the most important one to the participants at the time.

The problem with the language, according to Kushmaro, is that it transforms political competition into an existential struggle. This framing specifically pits the pro-Netanyahu bloc against the anti-Netanyahu bloc.

When an election is labeled as a matter of survival, a defeat becomes harder to view as a temporary setback. Instead, the losing side may feel the country cannot withstand the change in power.

Israel has struggled with this dynamic since Naftali Bennett formed his government in 2021. The central question shifted from who should govern to whether the losing side would allow the other side to do so.

Before the Bennett government was sworn in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called its formation the greatest election fraud. He referred to broken campaign promises rather than stolen ballots, but the label cast the new government as illegitimate.

The opposition worked to bring down the Bennett coalition once it took office. The Knesset became the main arena for this conflict because the coalition held a slim majority.

Likud MK Miri Regev defended voting against legislation that benefited soldiers and vulnerable groups in 2022. She stated that the overriding objective was to topple the coalition, a view she expressed in recordings published that year.

After Netanyahu won the 2022 election and formed a hard-right government, the roles reversed. Yair Lapid conceded the result and arranged an orderly handover.

As protests against the judicial overhaul grew, the language of illegitimacy returned. In April 2023, former Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin told a massive demonstration in Tel Aviv that the government was morally illegitimate despite being elected legally.

Diskin cited the government's appalling composition and reprehensible actions as the reasons for its moral deficit. The history of these arguments suggests that the framing of the 2026 vote will shape how the next government is accepted.