The Consensus

Two things happened under the name of one election. Dunia Badwan voted in Deir al-Balah. Fatah formed 197 municipal councils without a vote. The final count listed them together.

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On April 25, Salama Badwan took his daughter Dunia to a polling station in Deir al-Balah. She is eighteen. It was her first vote. “I’m very happy that I can vote in my country and my city, Deir el-Balah,” she said, “and that I, like others in my generation, can finally participate and have a voice.” She voted for a municipal council. Not for sovereignty. Not for protection from the airstrikes that have been falling on her city. For the council that decides how to distribute the municipal budget for water, roads, electricity, and garbage collection in a city that has been under siege. Four lists competed for fifteen seats. Twenty-two point seven percent of eligible voters in Deir al-Balah turned out. The city has been under bombardment.

On the same day, across the West Bank, Fatah formed 197 municipal and village councils by consensus. One slate presented in each locality. No competing lists. No vote required. The Palestinian Authority announced a sweeping victory. President Mahmoud Abbas congratulated Palestinians on “the success of the recent local elections, reflecting national and democratic spirit.” The 53.44% turnout figure reported for West Bank competitive races does not include the 197 councils where the question of turnout did not arise, because there was no one to turn out against.

The Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research described these elections with a title worth reading carefully: “Elections Between the Rubble and the Reproduction of Palestinian Legitimacy.” What the elections reproduced is not one thing. In Deir al-Balah, what was reproduced was the legitimacy of popular participation — people appearing, under impossible conditions, to choose among alternatives. In the 197 consensus localities, what was reproduced was the legitimacy of organizational reach — Fatah present, no one else having presented a competing slate. One kind of legitimacy is enacted. The other is assumed. The Palestinian Authority’s final count listed both under the same header.

Hamas’s position was more precise than the summary “boycott” suggests. Their November 2025 objection was to the amended election law, which required candidates to endorse the PLO’s political program — effectively, recognition of Israel. A Hamas candidate for a local water council, under this law, must accept the Oslo framework as a condition of candidacy. Hamas called this “exclusionary.” They stood aside. After Deir al-Balah voted, their spokesman Hazem Qassem called the vote “a positive and important step” and called for broader legislative and presidential elections. Reading this as anti-democratic hostility would be wrong. Reading it as an endorsement of the PA’s institutional architecture would also be wrong. Their position is internally consistent: Palestinian civil governance, yes; PLO recognition as a condition of running for a municipal water council, no. The distinction they are drawing is specific enough to be taken seriously, even by those who reject their broader politics.

Mondoweiss noted before the election that “Palestinians are holding local elections, but hardly anyone is running.” The headline was not metaphorical. In Ramallah, in Nablus, in city after city across the West Bank, for the first time in six consecutive election cycles, no competing party slates presented candidates. The organizational consolidation Fatah achieved is real. So is the set of conditions under which it was achieved: opposition organizing is difficult in ways that are not incidental to the circumstances of occupation and the PA’s security posture. Organizational strength earned through the absence of alternatives is a specific kind of strength. It is not the same kind as contested strength.

Dunia Badwan’s vote doesn’t make the 197 consensus councils more democratic. But it makes visible what those councils didn’t require: someone to choose them. That requirement is what she met — at 22.7% turnout, under siege, for a council managing rubble, in the first local election Deir al-Balah has held in twenty-two years. The legitimacy she enacted through the act of choosing is not conferred by organizational presence or presidential congratulation. It is produced by showing up when showing up is hard. The PA’s final count does not distinguish the two things. The distinction is there regardless.

Sources

- Solen