The Palestinian Dictator Postponed The Elections, Again
Mahmoud Abbas was supposed to face voters next month for the first time in two decades. Over the weekend he signed that away, and the Western governments that recognized a Palestinian state last year on the explicit condition that this vote happen are suddenly very busy looking at their shoes.
The Palestinian elections postponed by his decree were not some minor item on a calendar. They were the proof that the Palestinian Authority was reforming, the promise that persuaded capital after capital to upgrade a governing body into a state, and the reason diplomats told anyone who would listen that Ramallah was the responsible address for the day after the war.
The legislative vote had been set for late November, with a presidential election to follow early next year. The new decree erases both and merges them into a single ballot in September of next year. Palestinians last voted for a parliament in 2006, in the election Hamas won, and last voted for a president in 2005. Abbas should have left office in 2009 and has governed by decree ever since.
The reasons published through the official Palestinian news agency and the PLO Executive Committee, which Abbas himself chairs, all point outward. Conditions in Gaza, the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem are described as not conducive to voting. Israel is blamed for refusing entry to election materials and international observers, for military raids, for settlement growth, for settler violence and for withholding tax revenues. The stalled reconstruction of Gaza and the absence of an international stabilization force are listed too.
Buried under all of that is a detail reported before the announcement, which is that Palestinian factions including Abbas's own Fatah had already agreed they wanted the vote delayed, with a national dialogue to happen first. The people who would have been on the ballot asked for the ballot to be taken away.
They did, in writing, and that is what makes this week so revealing.
Canada tied its recognition of Palestine to Palestinian Authority reform that specifically included general elections during 2026, with Hamas excluded, plus governance reform and demilitarization. France stressed the Authority's commitment to hold general elections under international supervision within a year, alongside ending payments to the families of convicted terrorists, rewriting school textbooks and demilitarizing the future state. Portugal recognized after receiving assurances about institutional reform, the disarmament of Hamas and the return of the Authority to Gaza.
Not one of those governments built in a way to take the recognition back. The condition was announced loudly and the enforcement was never written down.
So look at what the response has been. The French foreign minister, Jean Noel Barrot, says France regrets the postponement and that it once again deprives the Palestinian people of the right to democratic expression at the ballot box, then asks the Authority to reconsider and offers help. Canada, whose own official description of its relationship with the Palestinians still refers to those 2026 elections, has said nothing at all. President Macron promised last year that France would keep a close eye on the full implementation of every commitment made to it, and the commitment was broken with nothing following.
Israel's foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said days earlier that Abbas was fooling the international community by preparing to cancel the elections he had promised. The Israeli warning was treated as partisan noise until the decree proved it.
Ramallah is not under siege, and its ministries function well enough to govern while apparently not well enough to count votes.
This matters far beyond who sits in a parliament building. For two years the world has insisted that a reformed Palestinian Authority should take over Gaza once Hamas is removed. An institution that cannot organize an election in the territory it already administers has no credible plan for administering the territory it lost. Israelis are being asked to accept this body as the alternative to Hamas, and the body just announced it cannot manage the most basic act of self government.
What do Palestinians themselves say?
This is the part most coverage skipped, and it is the strongest material in the whole story.
Samer Sinijlawi, who was leading a reform list called New Path, said the decision served the interests of those who benefit from the current situation, named the Authority's vice president as part of the push to kill the vote, and pointed out that candidates in Gaza had been campaigning while living in tents. His verdict was that these efforts disregarded the hopes of millions of Palestinians. Another candidate, Ahmad Shadid, mocked the official talk of circumstances and national dialogue and said that if he had killed the election he would at least admit it.
Mustafa Barghouti, a former information minister, said everything is now concentrated in the hands of the executive authority, with no independent judiciary and no parliament able to pass laws, and called twenty years without a legislative vote totally unacceptable. A spokesman for the faction loyal to the exiled security chief Mohammed Dahlan said Abbas is terrified of the electoral alliance forming against him. Palestinians understand their own leadership better than the foreign ministries that rushed to recognize it. And by the way, I am not legitimizing any of these voices, many Palestinian opposition voices are not innocent themselves, and the polling only shows a growing radical ideology among Palestinian public.
Polling published this summer by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found the jailed Fatah figure Marwan Barghouti leading the field at better than half of respondents, the Hamas leader Khalil al Hayya in second place at roughly a quarter, and Abbas himself down at fourteen percent.
Read those numbers slowly. The sitting president, the man Western governments treat as the partner for peace, trails the head of Hamas by a wide margin among his own people. Canada demanded an election from which Hamas would be excluded, which means Canada demanded a democratic mandate and the disqualification of the second most popular candidate in the same sentence. Nobody has explained how those two things fit together, because they do not.
There is a limit to how long this can be papered over. Either Palestinian public opinion is what it is, in which case a free vote is likely to strengthen the very movement that carried out the massacre of October seventh, or the vote gets curated by outsiders, in which case the democratic argument for statehood collapses. That dilemma is why the postponement suits almost everyone except Palestinian voters.
September of next year will arrive and the ballot may well be moved again, which is exactly why Mustafa Barghouti is already demanding a guarantee against another delay. The recognition granted last year stays in place regardless, because recognition is easy to give and almost impossible to withdraw, and the officials who signed those conditions will keep describing the Authority as a reforming partner. A government that will not face its own people has no standing to demand that Israel hand it more people to govern. Am Yisrael Chai.
The world set one condition before it recognized a Palestinian state, the condition was broken within a year, and the only consequence so far is a French statement expressing regret.
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