Can Netanyahu’s opponents rely on his Hungary-style eviction?

The scenes of the newly elected Hungarian prime minister Peter Magyar’s supporters joyously partying to techno and the fall of Viktor Orban on the banks of the Danube brought smiles to all the foreign ministers and Eurocrats you might expect. But it also gave a shot in the arm to a surprisingly confident opposition in a country you might not link automatically to Hungary: the state of Israel, where the opposition is polling on track to topple Bibi Netanyahu in elections due by October.

The similarities are there. It’s not for nothing that “Israel will not become Hungary” was a core chant of the mass anti-Bibi protests that were all the country could talk about before 7 October. Viktor Orban ruled Hungary for 16 consecutive years; Bibi Netanyahu, with an 18-month gap, for 15-and-a-half years. Both straining, as their rules lengthened, at the edge of the rule of law. Orban gutted the constitutional court, judiciary and electoral commission; Netanyahu has tried to do much the same with proposals to neuter the Supreme Court. Orban, from the palaces to the zebra parks of his inner circle, finally stank all too much of corruption for Hungarians; Bibi is already on trial for corruption.

Now, the wide anti-Netanyahu front very much hopes Israel will turn into Hungary because they have pinned their hopes on a Peter Magyar-style playbook. A right-winger, running on a big-tent, anyone-but-him campaign, with the promise of a more moderate foreign policy. In Israel, that man is Naftali Bennett, who briefly dislodged Netanyahu in 2021 for just over a year.

Last time, Bennett’s old settler party split around him, spelling doom for his unity government. This time, Bennett is going further: he is planning to run a new, more centrist party with two highly respected female civil servants as his deputies – what he’s calling his “repair team”. And Israelis appear to like it. Polls – and this is wartime, with its rally around the flag – show Bennett’s party only one seat behind Likud and the anti-Bibi bloc winning a majority.

Why? First, this is not a war that Israelis think they’ve won. Recent polling shows three times as many see the war as a failure as a success, and three out of four do not believe that Iran or Hezbollah have been severely weakened. Narrowly more Israelis view Netanyahu’s handling of the war negatively. And the opposition is fierce in its criticism. Yair Lapid, who leads the centrist Yesh Atid party, has accused Bibi of leading the country to “a strategic collapse” on the basis of “lies told to the Americans” resulting in “a military success that turned into a diplomatic disaster”. To a far greater and more existential degree than in Hungary, a significant chunk of Israelis are worried about their country’s isolation and want a return to treating traditional allies with respect.

But the truth is Orban did not lose on foreign policy, and if Netanyahu finally falls by October, it will be the same story. When Orban took over, Hungary was the richest of the EU’s new members, behind only the Czech Republic. Today it has been overtaken not only by Poland, the Baltics and Croatia but even Romania after six years of the highest cumulative inflation in the EU.

The frustration boiling over in Israel, amongst secular and traditional Jews of all stripes, is this. Exasperation that Bibi has continually rewarded at their expense both the West Bank settlers, with cash and outposts, and ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews, with vast funding increases for their parallel and anti-modern religious education system, whilst exempting them from military service.

This is where the politics gets Middle Eastern, not Hungarian. Bennett believes he can build a coalition out of a critical mass of the anti-Bibi secular, left and right, with wildly opposed views on the Palestinians, by promising to cool and park that issue and tackle Jewish zealotry instead. The glue is burden sharing. The irony is, Bibi’s wars have been fought not by the extremists his power relies on but by the secular and moderate Israelis those groups live off and deride. They may be in for a rude awakening when they finally come home and vote.