There is a burgeoning literature on how elected populists undermine democracy by eroding political, civil and legal accountability mechanisms. By conducting a comparative study of Turkey and Israel, this article aims to illustrate one specific tool utilized by authoritarian populists, namely fomenting violent conflict after electoral setbacks. This strategy aims to divide the opposition along ethnic/religious cleavages and maintain the incumbents’ grip on power. When the AKP could not win an outright majority after the June 2015 elections, Erdogan ended the Kurdish peace process and engineered repeat elections in the midst of heightened nationalist fervor and renewed conflict with the PKK. These elections gave AKP a parliamentary majority and marked the beginning of its alliance with the ultra-nationalists. Following Israel’s March 2021 elections, Netanyahu increased state repression on Palestinians, which led to interethnic violence and renewed confrontation with Hamas. The violence threw a wrench into coalition-building efforts between ideologically and ethnically diverse opposition parties. The comparison of Israel and Turkey as two countries with different majority religions and ethnic compositions shows that authoritarian populist strategies are not a parochial but a global phenomenon. Yet, the paper explains that the outcomes of these strategies are shaped by differing institutional and political contexts.