President Reuven Rivlin is set to open a round of talks in a bid to determine who the next prime minister of Israel will be. But the road to naming a new PM promises to be long, primarily because the future PM will need to form a coalition relying on Israel's smaller parties, that will use their seats to extort political gains.
The official results of Israel's third round of general polls will be announced on Wednesday, the country's Central Elections Committee said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party is still projected to lead, gaining 36 seats in the 120 seat Israeli Parliament, the Knesset.
Netanyahu's main rival, former chief of staff Benny Gantz and his Blue and White list, are set to be Israel's second largest party with 32 seats.
The rest of the seats are divided between smaller parties such as the Joint Arab List that got the unprecedented 15 seats, Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beitenu that will have seven representatives in the Israeli parliament, Labour Party's merger that will also have some seven seats and the religious bloc, comprising of three parties, that's projected to get 23 seats in total.
Yet, the release of results is only the beginning. Once they are out, Israel's President Reuven Rivlin will start a round of consultations in the end of which he will task one of the contenders with the duty of forming a government, and that, as two previous rounds of general polls have shown, will not be an easy task.
The main challenge for any contender would be to find the 61 seats needed to build a coalition and that means that bigger lists will need to dance to the tunes of smaller parties that very often use their position to squeeze out bigger budgets, better ministerial posts and other concessions.
Liberman, once an ally of Netanyahu and now his bitter enemy, was just one of those who have already voiced their demands.
However, Liberman is not alone. The alliance of four Arab parties has its own list of demands, and unlike with Liberman, whose conditions were accepted by the Blue and White party because they resonated with its secular voters, the dictates of the Arab parties will be tough to swallow. Nor will they be an easy sale to Israel's general public.
The List's other demands included the cancellation of Israel's repatriation law that allows Jews from all over the world to immigrate to the country, as well as a backtracking from US President Donald Trump's "deal of the century" plan that presupposed major land swaps and population transfers.
Now, after three rounds of elections that wasted billions in taxpayers' money but brought no resolution to the political stalemate, Israel wants change. According to the Israel Democracy Institute, 56 percent of Israelis would want to see the implementation of a two-party system, similar to the one used in the US.
Hours after the polls closed in elections last April, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared victory, confident that his Likud party and “natural allies” on the right and among the ultra-Orthodox had won a majority. When the final count was confirmed, his reelection indeed seemed assured: Those natural allies had won 65 seats in the Knesset.
Except that, out of the blue, one of those allies, Avigdor Liberman and his Yisrael Beytenu party, decided not to join a Netanyahu-led coalition, determining that the prime minister had become a serial surrenderer to ultra-Orthodox coercion and that he, Liberman, was going to stop the rot. Only if draft legislation ostensibly intended to raise the proportion of young ultra-Orthodox males serving in the army were passed in its current form, he said, would he again partner with his longtime ally.
Netanyahu tried to broker a solution, failed, and dissolved the Knesset rather than let his main rival, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz, get a shot at mustering a majority of his own. And thus Liberman — on the basis of a draft law that would not, in fact, make any significant difference to ultra-Orthodox conscription levels — condemned the Israeli public to a repeat election.
In September’s vote, Netanyahu and his “natural allies,” this time without Liberman, managed only 55 seats between them. Again, Liberman could have given Netanyahu a majority, since his Yisrael Beytenu gained ground, winning eight seats. By the same token, Liberman could have given the Gantz-led opposing forces a majority. But Liberman was evidently enjoying his kingmaker role, and chose to do neither.
He insisted that he would join only a unity government that included both Likud and Blue and White, and that excluded both messianists (i.e., certain right-wingers and the ultra-Orthodox parties) and the Joint List of mainly Arab parties, whom he repeatedly castigated as terror-supporting fifth columnists. Since Gantz’s diverse Blue and White party was united only in the goal of ousting Netanyahu, and since Netanyahu wasn’t going anywhere, no such government could be formed.
And thus, after weeks in which first Netanyahu and then Gantz tried in vain to remake the laws of (political) mathematics, Liberman’s insistence on playing kingmaker but refusing to crown a monarch forced Israel down the dismal route to yet a third election in less than a year.
But the most interesting and significant shift, coalition-wise, came from Liberman. After torturing the electorate for a year, he came off the fence Sunday and set terms for joining a government that Gantz immediately accepted and that he knows Netanyahu never will. On Monday, he met with Gantz and they agreed to work to build a coalition.
Liberman, for his part, opined that a fourth election would be “the worst of all possible scenarios” and vowed to prevent such a catastrophe… just as he vowed a few months ago, incidentally, to prevent third elections.
But two things are clear. First, that Avigdor Liberman owes the Israeli electorate some powerful clarifications and/or apologies. He could have spared us political deadlock since April by crowning Netanyahu. He could have spared us political deadlock in September by crowning either Netanyahu or Gantz. And if he does opt to crown Gantz now, he’ll need to come up with a better explanation than his reported comments to colleagues in recent days to the effect that there is “no chance” he will partner with Netanyahu because he blames the prime minister for a series of legal complaints filed anonymously against him and his family. If that was his reason, after all, then it would have applied equally in September.
And second, that the Israeli electorate deserves better from its leaders. Like the rest of the world, Israel is now grappling with a health crisis whose implications are still far from fully understood. We do not lack responsible professionals in key positions of authority. But we do lack a fully functioning government and a fully functioning parliament.
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