The do-over campaign for Israel’s do-over election is reaching its end; voters go back to the polls on September 17th. Last time around, in the April 9th election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assumed that he had won—or at least that a bloc of loyal-enough rightist parties had won. But, in the last hours of May 29th, just before the Presidential mandate to form a coalition government expired, he failed to muster, by a single vote, the required majority of the hundred and twenty seats in the Knesset. Rather than see the mandate pass to someone else, Netanyahu engineered a new election. It was a desperate gambit that, if the polls hold, will prove a futile one.

Over the summer, unprecedented alliances across the political spectrum have made Netanyahu seem more vulnerable than he has since the first time he lost office, in 1999. Should he lose, Israelis concerned about the fate of their democracy will sense an immediate relief. They are tired, most immediately, of his attacks on the judiciary and the police, his attempts to suborn the media, his willingness to tolerate soldiers violating Israel Defense Forces norms in occupation raids, his racist incitement against minorities, and his populist incitement against élites. In May, Benny Gantz, the leader of the new centrist Blue and White Party, which won as many seats as the Likud in April, claimed in his inaugural speech to the Knesset that his battle was “against the new threat to the democratic system’s functioning.” Indeed, it’s hard to find anyone in the opposition who does not see the election as a referendum on democracy.

Yet Netanyahu’s real nemesis has turned out to be not a coalition of progressive democrats but a former ally and a political tough, Avigdor Lieberman, whose secular-right Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel, Our Home”) Party won five seats in April. Lieberman refused to join a new Netanyahu government without assurances that ultra-Orthodox youth would be conscripted into the I.D.F., as the Supreme Court had ruled that they should—assurances that Netanyahu could not give without losing the support of the ultra-Orthodox parties, which had won sixteen seats. Lieberman’s recalcitrance can be explained on purely tactical grounds. His base is largely made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, many of whom are drawn to his (and Netanyahu’s) hard-nationalist and anti-Arab rhetoric. But the majority of Israelis who speak Russian at home say that “they never go to synagogue,” and they don’t want the rabbis meddling in their affairs.

In fact, seventy per cent of Jewish Israelis say that religious practice is not, or is only “somewhat,” important in their lives. Many abhor the separation of genders in public schools and universities and are dismayed that Jewish Israelis still can’t have civil marriages—and that the Chief Rabbinate has begun asking for genetic tests before allowing couples to marry. (According to the Law of Return, passed in 1950 and amended in 1970, in order to be granted citizenship rights a person must demonstrably have at least one Jewish grandparent.) Two-thirds of Jewish Israelis say that they want a “broad, civil coalition” government that excludes the ultra-Orthodox parties. Moreover, a slim but persistent majority identify as “right-wing.” Lieberman apparently grasped that the spectre of creeping theocracy could prove a wedge issue even among those voters, and so reverse his sinking popularity. (His party once got more than twice as many seats as it won in April.)

Yet Lieberman’s motives are personal, too. He previously served as the director-general of the Likud Party, and later as a minister in Likud-dominated coalitions, and made common cause with theocrats when it suited him. But Netanyahu thwarted and even humiliated Lieberman when it suited him. In 2014, he had Likud renege on an electoral alliance with Lieberman’s party. A new election portends revenge at its sweetest, particularly now.

That’s because Netanyahu is facing three possible indictments—one for bribery, two for breach of trust—and hearings are scheduled for early October. According to precedent and to Supreme Court rulings, if he is charged he will be expected, if not forced, to resign. And the timing of the campaign has made the case against him seem only stronger. Israel’s most widely watched news program, on Channel 12, aired a leaked transcript of testimony by the former director of the Communications Ministry (a Netanyahu appointee), confirming that Netanyahu had ordered him to issue regulations benefitting a media mogul from whom Netanyahu was aiming to extract political favors. (Netanyahu has urged Likud supporters to boycott Channel 12, calling its news “fake,” and accusing it of being “anti-Semitic” for co-producing a series with HBO—airing here as “Our Boys”—which shows Israeli extremists committing a hate crime against a Palestinian boy.)

Netanyahu hoped that, with a new election, he could secure a Likud coalition without Lieberman and with the ultra-Orthodox and national-Orthodox, pro-settler parties. The former will almost certainly hold their number of Knesset seats. The latter have no affection for Netanyahu, but they want to keep control of the ministries—Justice and Education—that give them the upper hand in Israel’s culture wars. They’ve indicated that they would pass whatever laws might be necessary to diminish the power of the Supreme Court and keep Netanyahu in office—and to win those wars.

Indeed, over the summer, a consolidated national-Orthodox party, Yemina (“To the Right”), led by the former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, formed, in order to end the factionalism that had cost Netanyahu’s coalition crucial seats in April. Shaked, who is known for a kind of glamorous ruthlessness—her campaign put out a mock commercial for a perfume called “Fascism,” purportedly exposing the left’s hyperbole—folded her party into Yemina. She had tried to join Likud, after the April defeat, but Netanyahu, always nervous about rivals, blocked her. She has signalled, however, that, should Likud and the religious parties get a majority, Yemina would join them to try to protect Netanyahu from prosecution. Another party, Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish Strength”), led by extremist followers of the late rabbi Meir Kahane, now looks as if it might win four seats, and it would also protect Netanyahu in order to advance itself. Those seats could bring Netanyahu’s potential coalition to just two short of a majority.

Still, Lieberman will likely prove the wiliest figure in the campaign. Blue and White is currently polling at around thirty-two seats, essentially tied with the Likud once more. Though the total number of center-left seats—including Arab members, whom Blue and White has not exactly embraced—falls at least five short of a majority, Lieberman can still plausibly believe that Netanyahu and the ultra-right parties will also fall short, and that his own party will hold the balance of power. In that case, he can drag out the process of forming a new government through October, forcing Netanyahu to face indictments before any legislation to save him can be passed.

In addition, Netanyahu’s forced resignation would facilitate Lieberman’s larger plan to keep the secular right in power: he has been hinting that he will recommend to the President that Benny Gantz be given the mandate. He has also made it clear that he will not support a Blue and White coalition that includes the progressive and Arab parties. Instead, he intends to prompt Gantz to organize a national-unity government, whose core would be Blue and White, Lieberman’s party, and a Likud without Netanyahu. This last element presumes that, if Netanyahu is charged, Likud leaders who are not simply Netanyahu sycophants— the former Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, for example—will abandon him. Last month, Netanyahu, showing signs of panic, extracted a public pledge from the top forty Likud candidates that they won’t try to replace him. But Lieberman has openly encouraged Party leaders to dump the Prime Minister.

This plan relies on a number of uncertainties, but it’s not fanciful. Lieberman’s party signed a vote-sharing agreement with Gantz’s. Knesset seats are apportioned according to the total number of votes a party wins—often with some votes, short of the amount required for another seat, remaining. Vote-sharing awards all the remainder votes to the party that has the most of them, and perhaps entitles that party—presumably Blue and White—to another seat.