Global geopolitical trends we’re tracking this week:

Another election, another deadlock in Israel

On March 23, Israel voted in its fourth parliamentary election in two years.

Supporters of the prime minister were hoping that a wave of post-COVID popularity would sweep Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies to something resembling a stable governing coalition.

They were no doubt disappointed in the final result.

Far from putting him over the hump, the election came as a setback for Prime Minister Netanyahu. The top vote-getters in the 120-seat Knesset are as follows: Likud (30 seats), Yesh Atid (17), Shas (9), Kahol Lavan (8), Yamina (7), UTJ (7), Yisrael Beiteinu (7), Labor (7), New Hope (6), Joint List (6), Meretz (6), Religious Zionism (6), UAL (4).

Neither the pro-Netanyahu coalition, which garnered 52 seats, nor the anti-Netanyahu bloc, which garnered 57 seats, have enough support to put them over the top and form a government. The kingmaker role thus falls to either UAL (Ra’am), a conservative Islamist party that broke from the Joint List at the start of the year, or Yamina, a nationalist party headed by former Netanyahu ally Naftali Bennett, who had a falling out with the prime minister in 2018.

Both parties hold out the possibility of coalition formation; however, it won’t be easy. Ra’am has made it clear that LGBT issues would preclude its participation in a coalition. On the other hand, while the Yamina party’s right-wing politics may seem a more natural fit for the Netanyahu bloc, the animus between Bennett and Netanyahu runs deep, and power-sharing negotiations are complicated by the long trail of Israeli politicians who have been ruined by the deals they cut with the prime minister (the most recent example being Benny Gantz, whose Blue and White party won 8 seats last week, down from its 33 haul in 2020).

Given the growing sense of existential crisis in Israel’s logjammed politics, all things are possible, including individual party defections and cross-ideological or cross-religious alliances, all with an eye on unseating the most dominant figure in national politics. However, the most likely outcome is far more mundane: more negotiations, more deadlock, and ultimately more elections.