It was Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party that eventually emerged victorious in Israel’s hard-fought general election. Likud took 36 seats in the Knesset, narrowly edging out the Blue and White Party’s 35 seats.
Netanyahu will now have first crack at forming a coalition, and he’s expected to duplicate the far-right bloc of his previous term. There will be some horse trading on cabinet positions, but the incumbent prime minister will likely be successful in assembling a coalition within the 42-day time limit.
Impact
There is no shortage of insightful takeaways from the contest. For one, the result cements Netanyahu’s reputation as a political survivor, now having ruled for over a decade (with a previous stint between 1996-1999). Yet this upcoming term could prove dangerous to Bibi’s legacy, as he faces the almost certain prospect of an indictment over potential corruption charges in the months ahead.
Netanyahu’s decade in office fundamentally changed Israeli politics, lurching it toward the right. The trend was apparent in the elections; consider, for example, the mere six seats that the once-mighty Labour was able to muster, down from its 18 seats in the previous election. The Right, represented by Netanyahu’s coalition, has become the standard bearer of Israeli politics, and the opposition has been relegated into a largely reactive role. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Netanyahu’s late campaign pledge to annex parts of the West Bank.
The center-left is wallowing in abject despair following the election result, but there are still signs that better days may lie ahead. Benny Gantz, the general-turned-politician who many on the Left hoped would be the one to finally unseat Netanyahu, performed well in his first election campaign and, even if his Blue and White party had come out on top, it would still have faced an uphill battle on coalition formation. Gantz has ruled out serving in a Netanyahu government, vowing to lead the opposition and, in his words, keep fighting to ensure that Israel’s institutions and rule of law are respected.
