Abbas in the 22nd year of his four-year term: Palestinian elections postponed again

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has postponed the parliamentary elections scheduled for November 28 and, in his new decree, has set September 11, 2027 as the date for both the parliamentary and presidential elections. This was announced on Saturday by the official Palestinian news agency Wafa, according to a report by Euronews. The presidential office in Ramallah cited security, logistical and on-the-ground obstacles that it said made it impossible to create the conditions for voting, while the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization approved the postponement on the grounds that the situation has fundamentally changed since the elections were called. From the outside, however, it looks as though only one thing hasn't changed: Abbas was given a four-year mandate in 2005, and according to the Times of Israel, he has been in power ever since — twenty years now, roughly fifteen years past the point at which he should have stood for re-election.

The postponement has a serious backstory, given that the last Palestinian presidential election was held in 2005, and the last parliamentary election in 2006. At that time, Hamas defeated Abbas's Fatah movement, and a year later it seized power in the Gaza Strip from Fatah by force. In 2018, Abbas formally dissolved the Palestinian legislature. He called parliamentary elections for May 2021 and presidential elections for July, but then, citing East Jerusalem, postponed both indefinitely, while the international press reported that he was in fact afraid Hamas would win again. He made his new pledge to the West as well: he wrote to French President Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman that he would hold elections within a year after the Gaza war, and according to Ynet, this promise played a significant role in France's recognition of the Palestinian state in September 2025. On September 24, at the UN General Assembly, he reaffirmed the November date once more, but now his deputy, Hussein al-Sheikh, informed Paris by letter that it would not happen after all.

To be precise, the postponement does not have only Palestinian causes. According to Western officials, Israel did not allow the Palestinian Central Elections Commission into the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem to prepare for the vote, and the Palestinian factions themselves decided in favor of the postponement during the talks in Cairo. Mohammed al-Hindi, deputy secretary-general of Islamic Jihad, told the Associated Press that the elections must be built on a "solid internal dialogue," which in the region usually means that no vote is held until it is known in advance who will win. Barely two weeks earlier, after all, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Abbas's old rival Mohammed Dahlan had formed an alliance to defeat the Palestinian president — and a ninety-year-old leader plagued by corruption allegations and a loss of legitimacy hardly needs a more obvious reason than that. Fatah held its first congress in ten years in May, Abbas was re-elected as the movement's leader, and his 64-year-old son, Yasser Abbas, was given a seat on the central committee, so Palestinian democracy appears to function more like a family business.

The reactions came, as usual, from two directions. Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar accused Abbas of misleading the international community by calling off the promised elections once again. EU High Representative Kaja Kallas was still saying this week that the November vote would have offered a long-awaited chance to renew the legitimacy of Palestinian institutions, while EU Commissioner Dubravka Šuica welcomed the calling of the elections back in September. Brussels thus finds itself, once again, exactly where it always ends up with Palestinian politics: applauding an announcement enthusiastically, then quietly accepting that, once again, nothing came of it.

For decades, the Palestinian leadership has told the world that nothing matters more than an independent state, yet its actions suggest otherwise. On October 7, 2023, Hamas massacred about 1,200 people, most of them Israeli civilians, and abducted 251 hostages, triggering a war that has reduced much of the Gaza Strip to ruins. The Netanyahu government's campaign — over which the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against the Israeli prime minister on suspicion of war crimes — has cost the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians. When the ceasefire took effect in October 2025, Hamas's first move was to show its own people who is in charge in Gaza. In footage verified by Reuters and the BBC, the group's fighters publicly executed blindfolded men in front of crowds, and according to Reuters, at least 32 people were killed in a single weekend, branded as collaborators or gang members, while in Ramallah the leadership that is supposed to offer an alternative to Hamas has failed to hold a single election in twenty years.

Where, then, is the great architect of peace?

It is particularly telling that while peace in Gaza is one of Donald Trump's greatest points of pride, and he personally chairs the Board of Peace born out of his twenty-point plan, the American president has not said a single word about the latest postponement of the Palestinian elections. Yet he would advise the Ukrainian president to step down in the middle of a war: on Friday he declared that Ukraine needs a new president, and blamed Volodymyr Zelensky for American fuel prices, even though these soared as a result of the Iran war he himself started. Zelensky replied that it is Ukrainians who choose their leader. In October 2025, during the Gaza executions, Trump said that Hamas's crackdown on "gangs" frankly didn't bother him much, and gave the group temporary permission to maintain order, while Benjamin Netanyahu, wanted by The Hague, remains one of his closest friends. So Trump only pushes for elections where a democratically elected leader stands in his way, but not where no vote has been held in twenty years.

The new date is September 11, 2027 — a particularly ironic choice, since it falls on a day the world associates with terrorism, not democratic renewal. If the Palestinian leadership still cannot hold a vote by then, Abbas can at least say that he has treated every deadline with unwavering consistency — in exactly the same way.

Ugar