Fifteen years after the last Palestinian national elections, President Mahmoud Abbas finally published a decree on Friday evening, January 15, which fixes the holding of legislative and then presidential elections in the Palestinian territories. Unless it is still eminently possible to cancel, these ballots must be held on May 22 and then on July 31. They will be followed on August 31 by the renewal of the National Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the representative body of Palestinians in the territories and in exile – a vote to be held in Palestine and as much as may be abroad.
The announcement had been expected for months, as the presidential party, Fatah, and Hamas, in power in the Gaza enclave, resumed their negotiations. But M. Abbas alone held the key, and postponed the publication of the decree fixing a timetable. In early January, Hamas appeared to lift its demand that the two polls be held jointly, in favor of a rapid succession of one to the other, during talks facilitated by Egypt, Qatar and Turkey. On Friday, the Islamist formation welcomed the presidential decree and expressed its “Strong will to make this obligation a success”.
Privately, some Palestinian officials, like many observers, had come to believe that elections were impossible during the lifetime of Mr. Abbas, 85. Elected to a four-year term in 2005, at the end of the second intifada and after the death of Yasser Arafat, Mr. Abbas has since wielded increasingly lonely power, at the head of a Palestinian Authority (AP ) whose legitimacy has continued to deteriorate. A majority of Palestinians, by their young age, have never taken part in a national election.
Relegitimizing the Palestinian Authority
However, the US administration of Donald Trump has reshuffled the cards, bypassing the Palestinian national project by profit and loss, and since 2016 by encouraging the maximalist demands of the Israeli right. This enterprise culminated with the normalization, since July, of the relations of the Hebrew state with Arab countries – United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco -, in a movement which promises to widen still further. The loss of this support came as a shock to the Palestinian Authority, which could no longer be satisfied with waiting for a possible return to “normal” after the American alternation.
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