Analyst says one in five Israeli campaigns claimed historic stakes

Danny Kushmaro has identified that one in five Israeli election campaigns have described their vote as the most fateful in the country's history. He argues this recurring refrain complicates the political process by elevating partisan disputes to existential matters.

The claim that a specific ballot box holds the highest stakes in national memory has become a standard opening for election coverage. Kushmaro notes that this language turns the competition between pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu blocs into a survival fight rather than a routine change of leadership.

This pattern of rhetoric creates friction in accepting election results. When a campaign is framed as the most important in history, a defeat sounds less like a temporary setback and more like a crisis the state cannot survive. This makes it harder for the losing side to grant the winner a legitimate mandate.

The tension over legitimacy became visible after Naftali Bennett formed his government in 2021. Before his administration was sworn in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labeled the coalition's formation the greatest election fraud in Israel. He referred to broken promises rather than stolen votes, yet the description cast a legally formed government as illegitimate.

Following Bennett's inauguration, the opposition focused its energy on dismantling the new administration. In the Knesset, where the coalition held a slim majority, opposition members sometimes voted against bills they supported to weaken the government. Likud MK Miri Regev defended this strategy in recordings released in May 2022, stating that toppling the coalition was the overriding objective.

The dynamic reversed when Netanyahu won the 2022 election and formed a hard-right government. Yair Lapid conceded the result and managed an orderly handover. However, 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 due to its appalling composition and reprehensible actions.

With the next vote approaching, Kushmaro advises against assuming the current election carries more weight than those that preceded it. The data suggests that the perception of historic stakes is a consistent feature of Israeli campaigns rather than a unique trait of the current cycle.