Levi and his colleagues see, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a kindred spirit to Hungary’s defeated autocrat. Israel “is not the Middle East’s Hungary yet,” Levi says. But, he added, “it’s getting closer and closer.” Indeed, opposition parties are bullish on taking down Netanyahu — and defending democracy is central to their campaign.

Americans know, and generally dislike, Netanyahu based on his foreign policy: the brutality in Gaza or more recent lobbying for the ruinous Iran war. But inside Israel, Netanyahu’s opponents are most animated by domestic issues: specifically, a fear that his ultimate aim is to demolish Israel’s remaining democratic institutions and stay in power indefinitely. This is a reasonable concern.

Netanyahu’s government has put cronies in charge of Israel’s security services, demonized the Arab minority, persecuted left-wing activists, and pushed legislation that would put the judiciary under his control. He is currently on trial for corruption — with the most serious charges stemming from a scheme to trade regulatory favors for favorable news coverage from a major Israeli outlet. President Donald Trump is actively pushing Israeli President Isaac Herzog, who holds a more ceremonial position, to grant him a pardon.

Netanyahu’s tactics come directly from the playbook Viktor Orbán used to hold power in Hungary for nearly 20 years — and the two leaders know each other well. So much like in the United States, Orbán’s Hungary has become a major part of Israeli public discourse: a boogeyman for the center-left and an aspirational model for the Netanyahu-aligned right. “I’ve never seen a foreign election being covered so closely [in the Israeli press] — except for US elections,” Levi says.

At present, Israelis expect a similar outcome. Polls consistently show that Netanyahu, who has been prime minister for all but one year since 2009, would lose his governing majority if elections were held now — and they’re required to take place no later than October. If these trends hold, then there is a real chance that he will be the next leader in the Trump-aligned far-right international to fall.

How Netanyahu could lose — and why he might not Whenever anyone talks about Israeli democracy, there are at least two giant and important asterisks attached. The first, of course, is the Palestinians. In the West Bank, they live under Israeli military occupation, unable to vote in Israeli elections and yet still subject to the harsh rules imposed on them by IDF leadership.

And the situation is even worse in Gaza. For Israeli citizens, Jewish and Arab alike, political life is meaningfully democratic: Elections are generally free of fraud and opposition parties compete openly under relatively fair conditions. Netanyahu’s authoritarian impulses have often been limited by his small-and-rickety electoral coalitions; his Likud party has never enjoyed a margin in the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) akin to Orbán’s two-thirds majority in the Hungarian legislature.

Yet here’s our second asterisk: Despite Netanyahu’s weakness relative to someone like Orbán, the quality of Israeli democracy has degraded substantially under his watch. While he has not yet compromised the system to the point where it can be considered a species of “competitive authoritarianism” — the political science term for Hungary under Orbán — his attacks on the judiciary and minority rights protections have damaged its foundations. Dahlia Scheindlin, a prominent Israeli political scientist and pollster, describes the country as only “very partially” democratic for its citizens — though she admits it still remains “nowhere near Hungary” in levels of authoritarian drift.

Delegations like Levi’s reflect the level of alarm among Netanyahu’s opponents: They believe that, with more time in office, Netanyahu could conceivably further entrench himself in power. While Hungary’s opposition might have just dug itself out of the competitive authoritarian hole, their Israeli peers hope to never be in it in the first place. So what are their odds of beating Bibi?

The short answer is that their chances are reasonable, but far from guaranteed. To understand why, you need to understand the deeper divisions in Israeli politics. Currently, Netanyahu’s governing coalition controls a majority of seats in the Knesset. The future is not bright: Polls currently show, and have shown for se