In forty-eight hours, the world saw the electoral defeat of one right-wing leader and the triumphant return of another. While Jair Bolsonaro did not acknowledge that he had lost the October 30 Brazilian presidential runoff, he does now seem to have been forced to give up his claim to power. Meanwhile in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu won the November 1 general elections, heading toward a far-right coalition of a kind the country has never seen before.

A short clarification is in order: most Israelis did not vote for Netanyahu (his bloc received 48.4 percent). He will however have a majority in parliament (64 of 120 seats) thanks to a law his party passed in 2014 that increased the threshold for parties to enter the Knesset to four seats (3.25 percent of the popular vote), thus creating obstacles for the Palestinian national minority, traditionally divided into several small parties. Indeed, with two left-wing parties failing to reach this threshold (Meretz and Balad), and with one allegedly anti-Netanyahu party mounting a transparent effort to waste left-wing votes (Ayelet Shaked’s Habayit Hayehudi), more than 7 percent of anti-Netanyahu voters will not be represented in the upcoming parliament. This is how gerrymandering looks in Israel.

Still, the big winner of the Israeli elections is not Netanyahu so much as his new ally, Itamar Ben-Gvir. A far-right provocateur in the campaign leading to Itzhak Rabin’s assassination in 1995, he has operated on the fringes of Israeli far-right politics for decades. Netanyahu, who faces several corruption cases, has enabled Ben-Gvir to mobilize young Israelis and win the elections in the hope that a right-wing coalition can change the laws that had brought Netanyahu to trial, or pass laws that will annul the power of Israel’s Supreme Court. In doing so, Netanyahu legitimized Ben-Gvir’s party (Otzma Yehudit, or “Jewish Power”) and ideology. Indeed, Ben-Gvir’s rants have become a commonplace spectacle on Israeli TV news — a form of entertainment even. With fourteen seats in parliament, Ben-Gvir and his followers now hope to conquer the Ministry of Internal Security. Whether Netanyahu is in a position to bargain with his new fanatical ally is yet to be seen.