By Paul Shindman, World Israel News -
Israel’s political parties are jockeying for position Thursday as the final ballots are counted from Israel’s fourth national election in the past two years.
However, with most of the counting done, it appears that the country is stuck with the same inconclusive result as the previous three, with no clear winner and political parties either prepared to make big concessions or head to a fifth election.
The 13 parties elected to the 120-seat Knesset are negotiating with each other to find a power-sharing arrangement whereby several of them together would make at least a 61-seat majority in the house.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party won 30 seats, the most of any party, but its potential coalition partners of the religious Shas (9) United Torah Judaism (7) and Religious Zionist (6) parties gives it a bloc of only 52 seats.
The opposition bloc that wants to oust Netanyahu from power is headed by the center-Left Yesh Atid party (17) and includes Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s Blue and White (8), nationalist Israel Beiteinu (7), Labor (7), New Hope (7), the left-wing Meretz (6) and the Arab Joint List (6), but that only comes to 57 seats.
The potential kingmakers appear to be the right-wing Yemina Party (7), headed by Naftali Bennett, and the Islamist Ra’am Party (4), led by Manour Abbas with a total of 11 potential swing votes.
Under the Israeli system, the head of state, President Reuven Rivlin, will next week invite representatives of all 13 parties to his official residence to ask them who they recommend to form a government. Based on who has the best chance of forming a coalition with at least 61 members, Rivlin will then give that person a month to put together a government.
There are currently three leading options available to Israel’s leaders given that no combination is currently showing they can achieve the magic number of 61 seats.
The first is that Netanyahu will manage to convince several parties to join him.
Bennett, who chose to sit in opposition last year rather than join a Netanyahu government, has not ruled out Yemina being part of a Netanyahu coalition, but that would give Netanyahu only 59 seats.
Despite Netanyahu having reached out to Arab voters, and Ra’am saying it wants a pragmatic approach to Netanyahu, Abbas said Wednesday there is no way he would join a Netanyahu government that included the Religious Zionist party, whose leader Bezalel Smotrich said he would never join a government that relied on the support of an Arab party.
The second alternative is for Lapid to cobble together the opposition parties whose ideologies span the political spectrum from Left to Right, but who all share the common goal of wanting to oust Netanyahu.
In order to gain Rivlin’s recommendation, Lapid would have to use the coming days to achieve the monumental task of winning the backing of the diverse parties. For example, New Hope defines itself as right-wing and its members are mostly disaffected Likud members who quit Netanyahu’s party in a bid to oust him. New Hope leader Gideon Saar has already said there is no way he would join a Netanyahu-led government, but he might have problems sitting with the extreme-left Meretz party.
A third possibility comes from Bennett, who has said in the past that he sees himself as a candidate to lead the country. Bennett has so far only said he is not ruling out any party as partners, but it is not clear whether he can overcome his history of harsh anti-leftist comments to win the support of Meretz and Labor.
As the results stand Thursday, neither Netanyahu nor his opponents appear able to get a majority in the Knesset. There are still two months of potential wheeling and dealing left for the parties to make compromises before the country will be faced with the daunting scenario of having to return to the polls later this year, most likely in the fall, to try again.
Image: U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv, CC BY 2.0 <;, via Wikimedia Commons
