Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be on course for a bigger victory in Israel’s fifth election in less than four years than initial exit polls suggest, all three of the country’s main television channels showed on Wednesday morning.
The Likud party and its natural allies are expected to win 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with 86 percent of the vote counted as of Wednesday afternoon, Israel time.
A coalition of Netanyahu’s Likud, the Jewish nationalist bloc Religious Zionism/Jewish Power, Shas and United Torah Judaism would, on paper, be the most right-wing government in Israel’s history.
Current Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his allies appear to be on track to win 50 seats. An Arab alliance called Hadash-Taal looks set to win five seats and is unlikely to support either Netanyahu or Lapid to lead the country.
Voter turnout was 71.3 percent, the Central Election Commission said. That’s the highest since 2015, according to the panel – higher than any of the previous four elections, from 2019 to 2021, that produced deadlocks or short-lived governments.
From initial exit polls on Tuesday night, a leftist party called Meretz appeared to have fallen below the 3.25% threshold to win any Knesset seats. If the party manages to win enough of the national vote to take a seat in parliament, the final results could change.
These are not final results. One in five votes nationally remains to be counted. Final results could come later Wednesday, but could take until Thursday to arrive.
Netanyahu’s return to the head of government would mean fundamental changes in Israeli society. It would include the newly emerging Jewish nationalist alliance Religious Zionism/Jewish Power, whose leaders include Itamar Ben Gvir, once convicted of inciting racism and supporting terrorism.
And Netanyahu’s allies have spoken of changes to the judicial system. This could put an end to Netanyahu’s own corruption trial, where he has pleaded not guilty.
Netanyahu himself was one of the main issues not only in Tuesday’s election but in the four that preceded it, with voters – and politicians – split into camps based on whether they wanted the man universally known as Bibi in power. or not.
Part of the difficulty in building a stable government during the last four elections was that even some political parties that agreed with Netanyahu on the issues refused to work with him for personal or political reasons.
Getting the official results will take some time – they could be ready as early as Wednesday, but it could be Thursday before the final composition of Israel’s 25th Knesset is clear.
That’s partly because parties must win at least 3.25 percent of the total vote to get any seats in the Knesset, a threshold established in an effort to make it easier to build coalitions by keeping very small parties out of the legislature.
To determine how many seats each party will receive, election officials must first determine which parties passed the threshold. They can then calculate how many votes are needed to win a single seat in the Knesset and award seats to parties based on the number of votes they received.
