Basically, we’re most likely headed to a fifth election! Woo Hoo!!!!!!
From Anshel Pfeffer who wrote the political biography of Bibi:
updated my @haaretzcom exit-polls analysis to take latest developments in to account https://t.co/DuGU27KPsN
— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) March 24, 2021
It’s almost 4am in Jerusalem and time to get a few hours of sleep. Only 20 percent of actual votes counted so far and it’s too early to predict major changes from the exit-polls. Tomorrow’s story is likely to be an attempt by Likud to delegitimize the result. But that’s tomorrow.
— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) March 24, 2021
From Noga Tanopolsky at The Daily Beast:
After initially showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party with a slight advantage, updated exit polls now show that no major parties have a clear path to forming a new government.
But that didn’t stop Netanyahu from claiming a premature victory. “You gave a huge victory to the right and the Likud under my leadership,” he said in a statement posted by the Likud immediately after polls closed at 10 p.m. “It is evident that a clear majority of Israeli citizens are right-wing, and they want a strong and stable right-wing government to preserve Israel’s economy, Israel’s security and the land Israel.”
A five percent reduction in voter turnout—possibly mirroring exhaustion among the Israeli electorate after four successive elections in under two years—has left open the possibility of an ongoing stalemate and a fifth election in the coming months.
From The Times of Israel (emphasis mine):
Barely two hours before presenting his exit poll as voting ended in the Israeli elections, Channel 13 pollster Kamil Fuchs declared that he’d “never seen such dramatic and decisive results.”
Dramatic, they may have been. Decisive, they were not. After two years of turmoil and paralysis, after the fourth election in two years, they did not point to a smooth, clearcut route out of Israel’s political crisis.
Published on the stroke of 10 p.m., Fuchs’ exit poll, as well as the exit polls presented by rival Channels 11 and 12, achieved the extraordinary feat of unanimously predicting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be able to retain power, by mustering the narrowest possible majority — 61 of the 120 Knesset seats — provided he was able to woo Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party into his coalition.
In contrast to the endless surveys in the run-up to election day, the TV exit polls are historically fairly accurate — give or take a seat or two here or there. And there’s the rub. A seat or two moving here or there could change everything.
And so it proved: Within three hours of the 10 p.m. surveys, Fuchs had amended his findings, and was now showing a 60-60 deadlock between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps, while Channel 12 had the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead, 61-59. More shifts seemed certain as the actual votes began to be tallied — a process which could take several hours, or even, whisper it, days.
On the basis of the exit polls, Netanyahu’s Likud performed reasonably well, slipping from 36 seats in last year’s election to 30-33 — despite having to fight off the additional challenge of his own former Likud ministerial colleague Gideon Sa’ar, who broke away to set up the New Hope party. New Hope would appear to have been one of the biggest election day losers, heading to just five or six seats when it was polling twice as well earlier this month. Bennett’s Yamina also stalled, at 7-8 seats — having been targeted relentlessly by Netanyahu in the campaign’s final days.
Netanyahu’s dependable allies — the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the new Religious Zionism alliance — significantly outperformed the pre-election surveys, however, mustering 22-23 seats between them. If those results hold true, one of the very big winners of these elections is the far-right Religious Zionism, which includes the Otzma Yehudit party, headed by Itamar Ben Gvir, an adherent of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane. All three polls showed Religious Zionism winning 6-7 seats, which would mean a place in the Knesset not only for Ben Gvir, but also for Avi Maoz, the avowedly anti-LGBT representative of the extremist Noam movement.
Netanyahu brokered the Religious Zionism alliance, paving Otzma Yehudit’s path to parliament, but then said he would not include its members in his government. If the final results give him a path to re-election that depends on Ben Gvir, he may have no choice.
Ben Gvir has indicated he would seek ministerial office; heading a party six or seven strong, he could demand the Justice Ministry, from there to advance legislation he has already promised aimed at halting Netanyahu’s corruption trial, and to attempt a radical “reform” of Israel’s judiciary.
The exit polls point to successes in the anti-Netanyahu camp as well, with Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, Labor and Meretz all outperforming the most recent surveys.
Yair Lapid’s main opposition party Yesh Atid seems to have fared a little worse than expected, at 17-18 seats — in part because he didn’t try to draw votes away from Labor and Meretz. And the conservative Islamic party Ra’am was seen below the threshold in all three exit polls, its breakaway from the Joint List apparently a failure.
Depending on the final results, Netanyahu may try to pry a defector or three from rival parties. But other party leaders may also try to galvanize all manner of other coalitions; no sooner had Channel 12 placed the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead, than Lapid was pledging to try to build a “sane government.”
Gideon Saar is a younger, more extreme version of a Likudnik than Bibi. His only real advantage is that, at least based on the reporting, not corrupt like Bibi, but he’s not interested or in favor of a two state solution, nor is he any better on any of the issues that Bibi is so terrible on. For some bizarre reason the original Lincoln Project principles thought he was a paragon of liberal democracy and small “c” principled conservatism and agreed to help his campaign. Which underscores the dirty little and largely unspoken secret of American campaign professionals, especially on the conservative/GOP side of the aisle. When they’re not working on campaigns here in the US, they’re doing the same thing in Israel, Britain, Canada, Australia, and several other countries. Which is one of the reason why all the conservative political campaigns and politicians are all starting to sound just like the ones in the US.
Back to the election results, we’re basically either facing Bibi muscling together another coalition government or, failing that, staying in power as the caretaker Prime Minister while the other parties and party leaders all run around trying to form a coalition to oust him, which would be the only thing they might all agree on, all while he undermines their coalition building and a fifth election is held in a few months. And since any coalition Bibi puts together, which will have as its primary intention protecting Bibi from criminal prosecution and liability, that coalition will actually be much more extreme than any of his previous ones given the results for the Religious Zionism Alliance and the Kahanists within it.
I don’t have much more to say other than at this point Israel is politically just a mess. There is no real viable center left to left of center parties. The centrists are doing better, but that’s not saying much. All of the vibrancy is on the right of center. And all that vibrancy is a one way ratchet pulling Israeli politics farther and farther and farther to the political, social, religious, and ethno-nationalistic extreme. Israel has always had a political identity crisis. It has tried to be both a small “l”, small “d” liberal democracy while at the same time having to be a garrison state. Those things are not just in tension, they’re completely at odds and I think we’ve pretty much reached the point that as long as the garrison state can keep the Israelis fat and happy, then the parliamentary liberal democracy just isn’t all that important.
I expect that things will get worse before they get better. And that we’re likely to see another election in a few months.
Netanyahu ally @Zohar is the first to foresee 5th elections: "If we do not reach 61 [out of 120 Knesset members] we will go to another election. We're not counting on defectors."
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) March 23, 2021
Update: The Bibists are now all talking #IsraElex5. For the Likud, its either Netanyahu or elections 4evah. No one else can legitimately rule Israel.
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) March 23, 2021
Open thread!