What happened
The most consequential of the cancelled elections was in 2021: Abbas had scheduled parliamentary elections for May and presidential elections for July — the first since 2006 and 2005 respectively — and campaign lists had already been submitted, including a slate that split Fatah's own vote in ways polling suggested could have cost Abbas's faction its majority. Weeks before the vote, Abbas postponed it indefinitely, citing Israel's refusal to permit voting in East Jerusalem as the official reason. Independent observers and rival Palestinian factions, including dissident Fatah figures, widely read the Jerusalem justification as a pretext, noting Abbas had multiple viable workarounds (used in prior elections) and that the postponement's timing, immediately after internal polling reportedly showed his own list underperforming, was difficult to read as coincidental.
Since then, the PA has by its own recent public statements committed to a fuller reform and election process: 2025 rule changes required candidates to formally commit to existing PLO agreements (a requirement Hamas and some independents said was designed to disqualify them without saying so directly), April 2026 saw actual West Bank municipal elections proceed with roughly 53% turnout, and Abbas has announced PLO-body elections for late 2026 and a presidential vote for 2027 — the furthest concrete commitment toward an actual national vote in nearly two decades, though similar commitments have been announced and abandoned before, and 2027 remained unrealised at the time of writing.
The practical consequence of this near-two-decade gap is that no Palestinian president or legislature currently governing the West Bank holds anything resembling a fresh democratic mandate — a governance failure independent of, though compounded by, the territorial split with Hamas-run Gaza.