Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced that presidential elections will take place in 2027, despite promising in October 2025 that elections would take place a year after the war in Gaza ends.
His statement, published by the PA official newspaper WAFA, did not give an exact date for the 2027 presidential election, but such elections have often been promised and rarely delivered. Abbas has remained in power for over 20 years, since he claimed around 65% of the votes in the last election, which took place in 2005.
Fatah political leader and president of the Jerusalem Development Fund, Samer Sinijlawi, told The Jerusalem Post that “while any public commitment to presidential and legislative elections is welcome,” Palestinians have long been disappointed by promises of democratic processes.
“In 2021, President Mahmoud Abbas not only announced elections but also issued a presidential decree setting specific dates, only to cancel the process weeks before voting was due to begin, when it became increasingly apparent that the official Fatah list faced a serious risk to its parliamentary majority,” Sinijlawi said.
“This time, the announcement is even less specific. No election date has been provided, no presidential decree has been issued, and no timetable has been presented for either the legislative or presidential elections. The real test will not be statements but actions,” he noted.
Abbas's plans ineffective for Palestinian constituency, might be better received by West
Though Abbas was once the popular choice, an October poll by the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 80% of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza want Abbas to resign.
Additionally, 60% doubted that a presidential election would be held in the promised time period.
The same center found, in a 2024 survey, that imprisoned Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti would wipe the floor with Abbas if he ran against him, winning by 40% to 8% of the votes.
Prof. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at INSS, told the Post that Abbas’s announcement was essentially the 90-year-old’s plan to use the “same maneuvers to run away from any significant reforms” and to maintain the “last drops of legitimacy.”
While Michael theorized that the announced election plans would be “ineffective vis-à-vis the Palestinian constituency,” he suggested that Abbas’s move might be “more convincing for Western clients who are in favor of the Palestinians and support them under any conditions.”
Abbas's decree aims to increase female, youth participation in democracy
The WAFA announcement also mentioned a decree that the number of seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council would be increased to 200 and the electoral threshold reduced to 1%, and at least a quarter of the candidates on any list would be women.
“If the Palestinian leadership is serious about democratic renewal, it should immediately issue a presidential decree establishing clear and binding dates for both elections,” Sinijlawi insisted.
“It should also finally enact a Political Parties Law. Although the Palestinian Basic Law guarantees citizens the right to form political parties, successive governments have failed to regulate this right. As a result, established PLO factions enjoy automatic recognition and can begin organizing and campaigning immediately, while new political movements remain trapped in a legal vacuum,” he explained.
“This creates an inherently unequal playing field,” he said. “A growing generation of younger Palestinian reformists and independents is attempting to establish new political parties and compete democratically, yet they currently have no clear legal framework through which to register, organize, and prepare for elections.”
Sinijlawi concluded that “Genuine democratic competition requires equal rules for all participants, not privileges reserved for existing political factions.”