Campaign Operations Derailed By Pollstergeist

The specter of a fifth election cycle has haunted Israel since last year.

Tel Aviv, June 30 – New parliamentary elections face Israel in just under five months, and already a destructive paranormal phenomenon has sabotaged several parties’ surveying activity, sources from behind the Veil reported today.

According to a statement by the Organization for Undermining Israeli Jurisdictional Assessments (OUIJA), a pollstergeist has wrought havoc in the inner workings of the Yesh Atid, Likud, Labor, Blue and White, and Ra’am Parties’ voter canvassing machinery, a development that threatens to compromise those groups’ efforts to prepare for November 1 Knesset elections.

“That’s the spirit,” confirmed OUIJA spokesman Peter Venkman. “There are things that go bump in the night, and there are things that mess up carefully-laid political survey infrastructure. When people talk about exorcizing the franchise, this is what they mean.”

Israel’s electorate has tired of voting; November’s contest will bring the fifth in four years, with little to no prospect of granting a convincing mandate to any one major bloc, neither of which appears able to secure a majority coalition of 61 seats in the 120-seat house. The specter of a fifth election cycle has haunted the erstwhile government of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid since its formation last year; the desperation to avoid yet another dead-in-the-water result led to the country’s first attempt to include an Arab party in the government. The mixed results of that effort indicate that resurrecting that idea in the next government, whoever forms it, seems unlikely.

Moreover, experts acknowledge, the fall of Binyamin Netanyahu, which occurred when Bennett and his partners cobbled together the current coalition, may well prove short-lived if Netanyahu can work some of his customary political magic and rise from the Opposition once again, a knack that his opponents across the political spectrum characterize as eerily reminiscent of the undead. At stake are multiple core issues that a Netanyahu comeback may bury just when the unorthodox – some called it unholy, even otherworldly – alliance of right, left, center, and Arab had begun to tackle them following decades of moribund policymaking: religion and state, judicial independence, prosecutorial integrity, integration of Arab citizens, illegal construction, and numerous other sensitive subjects.

As for Bennett, preliminary surveys place his influence at close to nil. “People are floating the notion that he might form the next government as well, but that idea has not a lick of séance,” remarked analyst Efraim Prizrak. “It’s a demonically stupid assumption, and that’s not just me throwing shade.”

Please support our work through Patreon.