Netanyahu cries electoral theft: bourgeois democracy tears itself apart before our eyes

According to Al Jazeera, Israeli officials maintain that the election results stand, while Benjamin Netanyahu insists the election was "stolen." Still according to the channel, the electoral body says this result, which leads to a deadlock, will not be called into question, even if the allegations of foreign interference were to be demonstrated. We do not yet know on what evidence these allegations rest, who formulates them precisely, or what the institutional way out of the deadlock would be. The rest is our reading.

The spectacle is instructive. A leader who governed for years beyond the reach of the rules he now invokes suddenly discovers that the referee can rule against him, and cries theft. When the ballot box smiles, it is the voice of the people; when it slips away, it becomes a conspiracy. That is legitimacy according to the ruling clique: a possession one seizes, never a right one holds from below.

Still, let us not fall into raptures over the electoral body. Its firmness is preferable to the temptation to "correct" the vote, granted. But note the formula: the result would remain valid even if interference were proven. The procedural takes precedence over substance. This is the logic of bourgeois parliamentarism that Rosa Luxemburg described: the participation of all strata in political life is real, but class antagonisms and domination are not abolished, they are laid bare. Here, they are laid bare to the sound of trumpets.

For what, in the end, is the voter asked? To choose between factions that administer the same order, the same war economy, the same militarism. The disagreement concerns who holds the tiller, not what the tiller is used for. When deadlock sets in, the game of coalitions and horse-trading resumes, far from the squares and the workplaces. None of these manoeuvres increases the confidence or the power of those who produce. This is the criterion we apply to every measure: does it strengthen popular organisation, or does it demobilise it?

Gramsci reminded us that changing the personnel is not enough to change the leadership. Whether Netanyahu is replaced or re-elected, the state apparatus remains what it is. True legitimacy will not be born of a commission's communiqué, nor of an incendiary tweet, but of the self-organisation of those who, today, watch two clans fight over the key to a house that is not theirs.

One may steal an election, perhaps. But one does not steal from a people what it has learned to do for itself; it only remains for it to get to work.