1. Netanyahu won, (almost) everyone else lost
While one of the three initial TV exit polls suggested that Blue and White leader Benny Gantz had achieved a historic “upheaval,” and was set to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after 10 straight years in office, the final results showed the opposite. Not only did the Likud leader win the seats and support he needs to lead the next coalition, he also received a number of other electoral gifts.
While Likud and Blue and White received 35 Knesset seats apiece, the right-wing bloc made up mainly of the current coalition members is comfortably ahead with 65 to 55 seats as final votes are counted. But Likud’s success came at the expense not just of Netanyahu’s chief rival Gantz but also of several right-wing parties he will be delighted to weaken, even as he needs some of them to form a coalition.
For days, Netanyahu and other Likud campaigners had pushed the message that the party could be headed for a loss to Gantz’s Blue and White. Some surmised that the so-called “gevalt” campaign was an alarmist ploy meant to siphon off votes from other right-wing parties and push Likud voters to the polling stations, while others genuinely feared that the prime minister’s decade in power could come to an end.
In the end, he both prevented a Blue and White victory and severely cut down the bargaining power of his most likely coalition partners, with Kulanu dropping from 10 to four, Jewish Home’s eight seats being replaced with the Union of Right-Wing Parties’ five, and Yisrael Beytenu going from six in the last election to five this time around. To boot, he also saw the loathed former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut party — which had threatened not to recommend him as prime minister — and Naftali Bennett’s New Right — a thorn in his right side — fail to enter the Knesset at all, with over 97 percent of votes counted. (New Right is still hoping to be saved by the soldiers’ votes.)
The only parties other than Likud to increase their vote share were the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, which rose from six and seven seats respectively to eight apiece.
If Netanyahu can forge a strong alliance with Shas and UTJ, potentially by promising them control over religion and state issues, his smaller right-wing allies could be almost neutralized within the coalition, certainly in comparison to the now mighty Likud.
2. Should Labor’s Gabbay learn from Netanyahu?
Of all the parties that lost seats and relative Knesset power, none compares to Labor. The party that governed Israel for the first three decades crashed from the 24 seats it won as part of the Zionist Union in the 2015 elections to just six, the worst showing in its 71-year history.
3. Bennett said he wanted to strengthen Netanyahu. He hardened him
The most bizarrely accurate prediction of Netanyahu’s election strategy came in a Kan report published on Sunday night, which said the prime minister was not only confident he could win both the most seats and a majority right-wing bloc, but that he specifically wanted to push out one of his current coalition partners. New Right’s fall from grace — apparently dropping below the electoral threshold while other parties that had polled lower during the campaign sailed into parliament to maintain the right-wing majority — was therefore either an incredible coincidence or an absolutely astonishing political machination pulled off perfectly by Netanyahu.
4. Feiglin was the surprise of the elections — by not getting in
Nearly every party leader promised throughout the campaign that theirs would be “the surprise of the elections.” In the last month of the campaign, the most convincing claim to the title came from Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut — a quasi-libertarian ultra-nationalist party centered around the dogmatic philosophy of its ideologue leader.
In the end, after all the hype (and maybe because of it), Zehut’s big surprise was that it utterly failed: to pass the electoral threshold and enter the Knesset; to take control of the treasury or any ministry at all; and, as its leader had promised, to reorder Israeli politics. Feiglin’s loss demonstrates the difference between breadth of support and depth of support: A lot of people kinda backed him, but at crunch time not enough to actually vote for him. (Or maybe the polls were just wrong about him.)
5. Arabs weren’t bused in by the Left. Maybe they should have been
On March 17, 2015, the last election day, Netanyahu, citing his fear of losing the election to Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union, infamously warned of Arabs “coming out in droves” to the voting booths, being “bused in by the Left.” He later apologized for this incendiary claim, which was lashed as racist by the Israeli left and around the world.
5. Arabs weren’t bused in by the Left. Maybe they should have been
On March 17, 2015, the last election day, Netanyahu, citing his fear of losing the election to Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union, infamously warned of Arabs “coming out in droves” to the voting booths, being “bused in by the Left.” He later apologized for this incendiary claim, which was lashed as racist by the Israeli left and around the world.
In the current election campaign, the prime minister again invoked the Arab Israeli bogeyman, stating repeatedly that an Arab-backed left-wing government would spell disaster for Israel. And the polls had been open for just a few hours on Tuesday when it emerged that activists affiliated with Likud had brought some 1,200 hidden cameras to polling stations in Arab towns in what the party said was an attempt to prevent election fraud (and the justice overseeing the elections ruled was a breach of election law).
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