Outgoing interim Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid borrowed a line from U.S. President Joe Biden last month when he said a win for the opposition would mean the “end of democracy.” That tactic turned out to be a failure, as Lapid’s party lost Tuesday’s election.
Biden has described President Donald Trump as threat to democracy for months. In a widely-panned prime time address on Sep. 1, Biden extended that warning to all “MAGA Republicans,” whom he accused of waging an “ongoing attack on democracy.” Biden set the tone for Democrats up and down the ticket, who have tried to paint their Republican opponents as insurrectionists if they doubted the results of the 2020 presidential election, as Democrats have done in many elections past. The polls, strangely, failed to respond.
Biden’s counterpart in Israel, the center-left government led by Lapid, nevertheless borrowed the idea that a vote for a conservative government led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would mean attacking democracy itself. That was, Lapid explained, because Netanyahu’s coalition would include parties who have promised to scale back the courts’ power of judicial review (i.e. to increase the power of the democratically-elected legislature, as opposed to the counter-majoritarian authority of the judiciary).
But the irony was rich. Lapid himself was merely an interim prime minister, part of a government of small parties, each of which lost to Netanyahu’s Likud Party but banded together to oust him from office in 2021. Moreover, Lapid had just flouted the authority of the legislature by negotiating a deal on offshore gas development with the Hezbollah-dominated government of Lebanon before seeking parliamentary approval. And the prosecution of Netanyahu for alleged corruption has been criticized as a flimsy antidemocratic plot.
Lapid and Biden seemed cut from similar ideological cloth, so the “end of democracy” — however farcical — was an easy rhetorical fit. However, Israeli voters cared more about the economy, security, and other concrete issues. American voters may feel the same.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.