Voter turnout was way down — from 71.5 percent a year ago to 67.2 percent on Tuesday. The distribution of seats was significantly different from predictions in both pre-election surveys and in the 10 p.m. exit polls on Tuesday night. But the big picture is all too familiar: the Israeli electorate has conjured up yet another non-definitive result.
The pro-Netanyahu camp has 52 of the 120 Knesset seats. The anti-Netanyahu camp has 57. Naftali Bennett’s Yamina, possibly inclined toward Netanyahu, has 7. And the great election confounder, the conservative Islamic Ra’am party — which not one of the three ostensibly ultra-accurate TV exit polls predicted would make it into the Knesset — has 4.
That means neither the pro- nor anti-Netanyahu alliances have a clear path to a majority, and only some kind of ideologically super-illogical amalgamation of strange political bedfellows can spare us from yet a fifth round of elections mere months from now.
A surreal coalition of an Arab party and an anti-Arab party, both anti-LGBT?
The prospect of one such surreal mis-alliance has already risen and fallen, though it may yet rise again:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu repeated time and again in the final weeks of the campaign that he would never include Ra’am in a coalition he leads, nor even rely on its support from outside for a majority. “Out of the question,” he told Channel 12 news last week, branding Ra’am’s leader Mansour Abbas an anti-Zionist. Yet as the results were tallied, and it became clear that Ra’am’s support could lift a Likud-led coalition to the magical 61-seat minimal majority total, several of Netanyahu’s Likud colleagues, including a senior minister, began publicly musing that perhaps Ra’am, hitherto an enemy of the state, was not beyond the pale after all. READ MORE
