Netanyahu challenges the ballot: when the Arab vote becomes a "theft"

According to BBC World, Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud has denounced foreign interference and claimed that Arab-led parties had "stolen" the election, after his coalition lost its majority. Israel's opposition accuses the Prime Minister of seeking to "delegitimise" the poll. The BBC summary says nothing, at this stage, about the evidence Likud has put forward for the alleged interference, nor about what the Prime Minister's camp intends to do with its accusations. We will not invent it. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

Let us first note the grammar of the accusation. It is not said that the opponent won; it is said that he "stole" it. Yet Arab citizens who vote, and whose parties are gaining ground, steal nothing: they exercise a right. To speak of theft is to suggest that their votes weigh less than others', that they are an anomaly to be corrected rather than a component of the electorate. The word betrays less a supposed fraud than a hierarchy of citizenships that the State of Israel has never fully confessed.

The mechanism is a classic one. When a parliamentary majority crumbles, the outgoing power has two options: rebuild itself around a programme, or cast doubt on the legitimacy of those who beat it. The second is less costly. It allows it to explain nothing about its record, to rally its base through fear, and to present the change of power as a coup from outside or from a "suspect" interior.

Luxemburg observed that bourgeois parliamentarism does not abolish class antagonisms; it lays them bare. One could say the same here of national and ethnic antagonisms: the ballot box, supposed to soothe them, exposes them in full light. It reminds us that formal democracy holds only so long as it does not threaten those who dominate it; as soon as it frustrates them, an arbitration more "authentic" than the suffrage is demanded.

Beware, too, of the other slope. An opposition that is indignant, very well. But indignation at a trial of illegitimacy does not make a project. If the anti-Netanyahu front contents itself with defending the result without saying what it intends to do with it, for Palestinian citizens of Israel as much as for workers of every stripe, it will simply manage the existing order with different faces. Defending the ballot is necessary; believing that it is enough is a comfort.

What remains is what the dispatch does not say: the exact extent of the Arab parties' gains, any appeals, the response of the institutions. Those answers will matter. But the fundamental question is already posed: a power that recognises its opponent's victory only when it loses narrowly does not love democracy, it loves a favourable count.

One may contest an election; one cannot, without shame, contest those who have the right to vote in it.