Benjamin Netanyahu approaches the October 27 election not as a man fighting for survival but as a figure who has already won the deeper contest. His Likud party may lose seats — polls project a drop from 32 to roughly 20-22 — but the opposition arrayed against him is composed almost entirely of right-wing, militaristic parties that differ from Netanyahu on personality, not ideology. The Thatcher parallel invoked by analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg is precise: the greatest legacy is forcing the opposition to adopt your premises. The mechanism is worth tracing. Since 1996, Netanyahu has governed through coalition arithmetic that requires ever-harder-right partners, normalizing figures like convicted racist Itamar Ben-Gvir and settler advocate Bezalel Smotrich at the heart of Israeli governance. The 2018 Nation-State Law stripped Arabic of official status, declared Jewish settlement a national value, and codified ethno-nationalism as constitutional architecture. Settler violence surged from 1,291 recorded attacks in 2023 to 1,835 in 2025. At least 1,071 Palestinians, including 233 children, have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces or settlers since October 7, 2023, amid what the UN called 'virtually no accountability.' The judiciary overhaul of January 2023 revealed the pattern most clearly. Netanyahu sought to strip courts of oversight power while facing corruption charges dating to 2019 — charges that could result in imprisonment. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested, but the confrontation was never truly about judicial philosophy. It was about removing the last institutional constraint on executive power while under personal legal threat. Netanyahu later suggested the division caused by his own reforms somehow contributed to the October 7 security failure. What makes the coming election structurally unusual is not its competitiveness but its narrowness. Former army chief Gadi Eisenkot leads the anti-Netanyahu bloc, but as outgoing parliamentarian Aida Touma-Sliman of Hadash points out, prominent Arab MK Sami Abu Shehadeh was barred from running over remarks about the Gaza war, while Netanyahu — wanted by the International Criminal Court on war crimes charges — faces no such barrier. The system filters out dissent from below while protecting power from above. Netanyahu's personal story — the pessimistic father, the martyred brother at Entebbe, the early career as Israel's UN ambassador — has always served as origin myth for a worldview in which existential threat justifies any measure. Former aide Mitchell Barak describes him as someone who 'thrives in chaos' and operates on 'ends justifying means.' The international walkout at the UN General Assembly in September was, for his base, not an embarrassment but a credential. The 20-year trajectory is what matters. Netanyahu has not merely governed Israel rightward; he has restructured the political ecosystem so that the viable alternatives are also rightward. Palestinian statehood is dead as a mainstream Israeli political proposition. Judicial independence is weakened. Settler expansion is constitutionally enshrined. Even if Netanyahu loses this election, the opposition that replaces him inherits — and largely accepts — the architecture he built. Flaschenberg's assessment is the sharpest lens available: 'All of the main contenders are right-wing, militaristic and ultimately racist. That's Netanyahu's legacy.' The question Israeli voters face on October 27 is not whether to change direction but whether to change the driver on a road whose destination was set years ago.
