For the first time in years, Palestinian politics is showing signs of life. On July 9, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree calling elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council — the PA’s parliament, which he dissolved in 2018 — set for November 28.
Alongside a looser pledge to hold a presidential election in early 2027, Abbas has also moved to reconstitute the abeyant Palestinian National Council (PNC), the Palestine Liberation Organization’s parliament representing Palestinians both inside and outside of the occupied territories. On June 4, Abbas issued a decree to ratify a new 350-seat structure — 200 seats for the occupied territories, to be filled by winners of an expanded, 200-member Legislative Council, and 150 for the diaspora.
These announcements follow several other political developments earlier this year. In February, a provisional constitution for the State of Palestine was released for public review, the product of a drafting committee Abbas established in August 2025. Two months later, municipal elections were held across the West Bank and, amid the ruins of Gaza, in Deir al-Balah. And in May, Fatah held its first general conference in nearly a decade, electing a new Central Committee.
Also worth noting, though not directly related: Hamas elected Khalil al-Hayya as head of its political bureau on July 20 after nearly two years without a permanent leader.
Despite the unprecedented crisis Palestinians face, none of Abbas’ decrees are the product of an organic effort to revive a moribund polity and confront Israeli aggression. They are primarily a response to misplaced external pressure for “PA reform” aimed at reviving the defunct two-state solution — pressure landing on an institution that is financially destitute and searching for a seat at the table it no longer has.
In response to the crisis sparked by October 7, several states led by Saudi Arabia and Norway have sought to revive the diplomatic peace process centered on Palestinian statehood, including by granting formal recognition. Abbas has latched on to this initiative, known as the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, as a political and economic lifeline. This has included a commitment — half-hearted though it may be — to institutional reform and elections.
Regardless of the motivations behind it, however, the prospect of elections is an opportunity Palestinians should not miss. The genocide in Gaza and accelerating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank have done little to generate the change Palestinian politics urgently needs, and thepublic remains paralyzed by fear, exhaustion, and the absence of direction. Elections are limited in what they can accomplish, but they remain the most straightforward opportunity to break a corrupt and complacent leadership’s stranglehold over Palestinian institutions.
For years, Abbas and his inner circle have successfully obstructed factional reconciliation, institutional revitalization, and a pivot in national liberation strategy. It is more clear than ever that only by dislodging the obstructionists from power can Palestinians kickstart a political revival.
Elections for Relevance
Since October 7, 2023, the PA has become more marginalized than ever: Already staggeringly unpopular among Palestinians, the institution has faced a political and economic assault by an Israeli government content to see it topple, and with Gaza as the main theater of international attention and activity, it has largely been ignored by the current U.S. administration. That has left its leadership desperate for relevance, and open to democratization as a path back to international good graces.
This is not dissimilar to early 2021, when Fatah —in coordination with Hamas — agreed to hold elections to win the support of the incoming U.S. administration under President Joe Biden. Yet Washington proved ambivalent, more concerned with keeping Hamas out of the PA than seeing democratic revitalization, and Abbas ultimately canceled the elections 23 days before the vote.
This time, however, could be different. The states pushing the reform agenda are demanding elections. Navigating that external pressure without ceding power, rather than any broader national good, appears to be Abbas’s primary motivation. Hamas’s military and political decimation only makes the maneuvering easier.
Some of the pressure has produced notable improvements in the electoral framework. In addition to expanding the Legislative Council, Abbas’s June 4 decree lowered the candidacy age from 28 — one of the highest in the world — to 23 and reduced the electoral threshold for gaining a parliamentary seat to 1 percent. But months earlier, Abbas moved to curtail who can actually challenge his party by amending the municipal election law: All candidates now must sign a declaration of allegiance to the PLO’s political program, which includes Oslo-era commitments to recognize Israel and renounce armed resistance. Five factions, four of them PLO members, rejected the requirement outright. Hamas, which sat out the April municipal elections, could not have met it either way.
Abbas also appears to be reversing part of these reforms, just weeks after ratifying them. According to The New Arab, the plan is to restore the Legislative Council to 132 seats and convert the 68-seat difference into a PNC bloc chosen not by election but by “consensus” — most likely meaning appointment by Abbas himself, giving him direct say over nearly 20 percent of the PNC’s makeup. It is precisely the kind of machination that tempers one of the clearest values these elections were supposed to advance: democratic political representation inside the PLO.
The 90-year-old Abbas has also been steadily building a succession plan around his right-hand man, Hussein al-Sheikh. First installed on the PLO’s Executive Committee and made its Secretary-General in 2022, al-Sheikh was then handed two newly created offices in April 2025 — vice president of the State of Palestine and vice chairman of the PLO Executive Committee.In October 2025, he was decreed acting president for up to 90 days should Abbas die or become incapacitated, a provision with no basis in the interim Palestinian constitution known as the Basic Law.
This year, following Fatah’s general conference in May,al-Sheikh was also elected deputy leader of the group — rounding out his potential accession to every relevant institution of control. During the conference, Abbas also orchestrated his son Yasser’s election to the Central Committee, another loyal lieutenant to steer the ship, and a useful perch from which to protect the family’s business interests.
Still, if campaigning moves into full swing this fall, it remains to be seen what happens. Abbas and Fatah could still lose control of the process, as they did in the 2021 election cycle before Abbas pulled the plug in the face of significant public political engagement — nearly 1400 candidates and 29 new party lists contesting 132 seats — and, crucially, notable Fatah figures breaking off to form rival lists.
The External Reform Agenda
Behind all of this, the external pressure driving Abbas toward the ballot box is itself of dubious value and motivation. Many of the states involved in the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution are earnest, but there is a long history of performative engagement never meant to challenge the status quo, shifting the burden of action onto the weaker Palestinian side that has little choice but to comply. Even at best, the broader PA reform agenda is simply misguided, failing to appreciate and address the actual obstacle to peace: Israeli intransigence.
This echoes the often-overlooked 2009–2011 period when Salam Fayyad, Abbas’s then-prime minister, tried to build the institutions of a Palestinian state from the ground up, betting the establishment of a functioning proto-state — including free market reforms and enhanced security coordination with Israel — would be rewarded with Palestinian independence. That project collapsed for the same reason the current one is likely to: It was never matched by commensurate pressure on Israel to actually allow a state to emerge.
Today, the absence of such pressure is clearer than ever. Despite the gravity of Israeli crimes since October 7, no meaningful action has been taken to stop Israel’s genocide or compel it to end its illegal occupation and apartheid rule, as required by International Court of Justice rulings. The European Commission proposed suspending trade preferences under the EU-Israel Association Agreement in September 2025; it has never been adopted, blocked by member-state divisions even after more than 350 former European officials demanded the move in April 2026. The bloc’s only enacted response has been sanctions on four Israeli settler organizations in May 2026 — a fraction of the leverage it proposed for itself eight months earlier. Arab states that normalized relations with Israel haven’t moved to sever them either.
What connects all of this is a broader unwillingness — among most European governments, Arab states, and Washington alike — to actually advance the two-state solution, if that were even possible. Demanding reform from a captive, bankrupt PA costs nothing. Challenging Israeli intransigence would cost something. That gap is the real history behind the reform agenda, and why many Palestinians do not see it as credible.
It is unclear how far these outside parties will push Abbas to follow through if he feels his grip on power truly slipping. In 2021, Abbas used the pretext of Israel denying Palestinians in Jerusalem the ability to vote as reason to cancel them, in effect handing Israel a veto over Palestinian democracy. For the time being, it remains highly unlikely Israel’s current government would allow Palestinian voting in the city. While Israel’s own elections are slated for a month before the Palestinian ones, it takes an average of 50 days to form an Israeli coalition, likely leaving the current government in office to thwart Jerusalem voting; Abbas could thus ostensibly invoke the Jerusalem pretext again, if the Global Alliance lets him off the hook or he chooses to defy it.
Even more importantly, the elections will not address deeper questions about the continued relevancy of the PA, which should be part of a broader and much-needed discussion of national liberation strategy. Where does the Palestinian national movement actually stand today, and where is it headed? Should the PA even be part of its future? What does it mean to hold elections amid an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing campaign, with Gaza destroyed and large swathes of the West Bank being emptied out and annexed in real time?
Yet the deep entanglement of the PA and the PLO means these elections bear directly on any reconstitution of the broader movement. Set against two and a half years of shocking inactivity — a PLO that failed to muster a response to genocide, a PNC that never once convened during the onslaught, a leadership incapable of mounting a unified diplomatic response to its own near-erasure from the postwar process — as well as the inability of domestic and diasporic communities alike to challenge the prevailing power structure, it is hard to argue organic change will come from anywhere else. Opportunities have to be seized where they present themselves, even from dubious sources.
An election, however cynically it is called into being, is the one internal mechanism available to Palestinians that could bring meaningful change: If they indeed take place, which is admittedly doubtful, Abbas would be forced to risk his own control through actual contestation, or at least begin chipping away at it. That is the opportunity now in front of Palestinians whatever the motives of the leadership that opened it. The objective now should be to put pressure on the external parties to make sure those elections count.
