Elections in Israel, Brazil and Serbia — Lies, Damned Lies and Conspiracy Theories

Benjamin Netanyahu has answered his failure to win a majority in Israel's parliamentary election with a conspiracy theory Donald Trump has been honing since 2020. On Wednesday, the country's longest-serving prime minister posted on his own X account a Likud party statement declaring that the vote had been "stolen”: “by Arab parties that support terrorism" through bribery, threats, forgery and banned software, demanding an investigation by the police and the Shin Bet, the domestic security service. When the head of the Central Elections Committee asked the Shin Bet to look into suspicions of foreign interference that he said he could not verify, Likud went further, presenting the supposed plot, without evidence, as aimed at "a foreign takeover of the Knesset, the Islamization of Israel." Party figures pointed at Qatar.

"Stop the Steal" was the rallying cry of Trump supporters who refused to accept Joe Biden's victory in 2020. Trump endorsed Netanyahu ahead of the vote, and analysts had speculated whether the Israeli leader would follow his lead. He did but the tactic was in fact not a new one. In 2015, as Israelis voted, Netanyahu warned that Arab citizens were heading to the polls "in droves." In April 2019, Likud sent activists with cameras to film Arab voters at the ballot box, and that September he accused his opponents in a Facebook video of conspiring to "steal" the election while pushing to put every polling station under video surveillance. In 2021, as a coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid ousted him, he called it "the biggest election fraud in history." And this Tuesday, while polls were still open, he claimed on social media that "Muslim Brotherhood supporters" were "storming polling stations and stealing the election."

Israel is not the only country currently gripped by unfounded conspiracy theories flying about vote theft in crucial polls. As the European Digital Media Observatory has noted, three major elections held the same week, in Brazil, Serbia and Israel, shared one defining feature: disinformation and conspiracy theories aimed at undermining the democratic process itself. In Brazil, far-right candidate Flavio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, who was convicted over an attempted coup after losing in 2022, refused to acknowledge President Lula's decisive victory. “This opened the floodgates to the mass circulation—both in Brazil and around the world—of baseless conspiracy theories claiming that the election had been rigged and, in effect, stolen,” the digital media observatory points out. He received Trump's support and has since fled to the United States. In Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić conceded to the Students' List after 14 years in power, but blamed it on interference by European countries and an American "Deep State" hostile to Trump. He called the result "the legitimisation of a revolution," language that the digital media observatory says echoes Russian propaganda and conspiracy theories about Western-orchestrated “colour revolutions”. Whether the model comes from Washington or Moscow, the observatory concludes, the lesson in how to delegitimize democracy when it fails to deliver the desired result "has been learned across the globe."

In Israel, as in Brazil, there was no evidence for claims of a vast conspiracy to steal votes. The committee's acting director general said there was "no basis for allegations of election theft." Israeli police said they had found nothing to support Likud's claims, and the Shin Bet said its narrowly defined inquiry cast no doubt on Arab voters. The final count simply gives Netanyahu's bloc 53 of 120 seats, opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot's 48 and Arab-led parties a record 19.

None of this is surprising. Conspiracy theories were the hallmark of this election campaign in Israel, and they came from the top echelons of the state and its media backers rather than its fringes: the prime minister, his wife, Likud lawmakers and Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu news channel that, according to the media watchdog The Seventh Eye, accounted for more than half of the false election narratives aired on Israel's five main channels in June and July. Each conspiracy theory has been proferred in an attempt to clear Netanyahu, who has been on trial for corruption since 2020 and was in office on 7 October 2023, and to shift the blame onto his rivals, the justice system, the security chiefs or Arab citizens.

 "The deep state"

Netanyahu has enthusiastically pounced upon and adapted the conspiratorial concept from Donald Trump's MAGA movement and from the Kremlin. In March 2025, as he moved to fire Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, whose agency was investigating his aides, he posted that in America and Israel "the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people's will." The post appeared on the official prime minister's account, was deleted, then reappeared on his personal one.

In the campaign the Deep State slogan became a core theme. On 13 October, on Channel 14, he called for a criminal investigation of everyone involved in the "criminal fabrication" of his corruption cases, adding that he must "also deal with the deep state. And I will." Two days before the vote, he told public radio the attorney general "will be replaced" and boasted of installing his picks at the Shin Bet and the Mossad despite her opposition "and that of the deep state." The defendant becomes the victim of a plot; the justice system trying him becomes the conspirator.

The “Deep State” is a classic trope of conspiracy literature. The phrase originally comes from Turkey, where it described real clandestine networks inside the security apparatus. Then from 2017, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement made it popular in the United States, using it to dismiss investigations into him as sabotage. Moscow has embraced the concept as another tool to use in its relentless online and hybrid attacks against the West and democrac. Kirill Dmitriev, Vladimir Putin’s special envoy and a chief propagandist, routinely blames a Western “deep state” for subverting dialogue between Washington and Moscow. It now refers to a supposed hidden alliance of intelligence services, politicians and organised crime. Conspiracy theorists, from QAnon followers to far-right YouTubers, pin the blame on this amorphous entity for everything from the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the 9/11 attacks to an invented satanic paedophile network of Democrats, without evidence and without naming anyone. In Israel, Channel 14 was already spreading deep state conspiracies in 2023 to claim that the CIA was behind the mass protests against Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul.

October 7 and the "traitors within"

Even October 7, the deadliest day in Israel’s history, was twisted into a conspiracy theory during the Israel election campaign. On 31 August, Sara Netanyahu told Channel 14 that Yair Golan, leader of the left-wing Democrats and a former deputy army chief, had been on the scene of the Hamas attack "early in the morning, already dressed and ready." The insinuation was that he knew in advance, while her husband was left uninformed. In fact Golan drove south around 8 a.m., about 90 minutes after the attack began, to help rescue survivors of the Nova festival. He sued her for defamation. "Paranoia, it turns out, is a family business," he said.

The next day In an Instagram livestream the Prime Minister said security chiefs had deliberately not woken him that night because they knew he would have placed the army on alert. "If they had woken me, everything would have been different," he said. Following widespread outrage at his blaming of the army, he spoke that evening of "a great failure" and called talk of betrayal "complete nonsense." Netanyahu had floated the same idea on X in October 2023, then deleted it and apologised. Three years later it was a key campaign talking point - long promoted by Likud MK Tally Gotliv, including against protest leader Shikma Bressler, who sued her for libel.

An older playbook: George Soros

“The use of the billionaire philanthropist, a traditional bogeyman of antisemitic hate merchants and conspiracy theorists, predates this campaign. In 2017, as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán ran billboards against Soros, in a strategy shaped partly by former Netanyahu chief of staff George Birnbaum, Israel’s foreign ministry, then headed by Netanyahu himself, said Soros ‘continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments.’” In 2018 Netanyahu accused Soros, without any proof, of funding protests against the deportation of African asylum seekers. His son Yair posted a cartoon placing Soros at the apex of a  "food chain" of hidden masters, above a reptilian figure and former prime minister Ehud Barak. The ADL condemned the imagery as antisemitic and the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke applauded it. The image of Soros secretly pulling the strings is a classic of antisemitic conspiracy theories: the all-powerful Jewish financier manipulating governments from the shadows. That Soros is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor did not stop the Israeli prime minister’s son from spreading it. An antisemitic conspiracy theory had come full circle, now relayed from the heart of the Jewish state.

For more information listen to Conspiracy Watch director Rudy Reichstadt and Tristan Mendès France examining the role of conspiracy theories in the Israel election campaign in episode 116 of Complorama, the French-language podcast on franceinfo: "Israël, le complotisme à l'heure des élections".