Final results are expected next week, but already the former Israeli prime minister and his ultranationalists allies hold a strong lead.
Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu is set for a stunning return to power just over a year after being toppled as prime minister at the head of what is likely to be a far-right governing coalition — possibly the most extreme in the country’s history.
With nearly 90% of votes counted after the Tuesday election — the country’s fifth in less than four years — Netanyahu’s Likud party and its Jewish ultra-orthodox and ultranationalist allies held a commanding lead over a combination of centrist, leftist and Arab factions.
Although final results are not expected until later in the week, analysts are already hotly debating the variables that led to Netanyahu’s victory, including his success at turning out the traditional Likud voter base; the relative cohesion of the pro-Netanyahu alliance, which coalesced into just four parties; and the fractiousness of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, which ran no fewer than eight parties.
Two of those parties — the Palestinian nationalist Balad and the left-wing Meretz — failed to make it over the 3.25% electoral threshold for entry into Parliament, according to early results, thereby ensuring Netanyahu’s victory. “It’s stupidity. The difference [between the two camps] is 3700 votes. The [anti-Netanyahu] Change Coalition lost because it didn’t unite,” Camil Fuchs, a leading Israeli pollster, told Haaretz on Wednesday. (That figure rose to a still modest 8000 votes later in the day.)
Read the article by Neri Zilber in Crikey.