Netanyahu scores spectacular victory in Israeli elections

Israelis went to bed on Tuesday night with TV exit polls showing a tie between prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud and the centre-left Zionist Union headed by Yitzhak Herzog: they woke up yesterday to the actual results showing a spectacular victory for Mr Netanyahu.

Everyone is asking how all the exit polls could get it so badly wrong, but that’s a question for another day.

Four days before the vote the last polls showed Likud trailing by four seats to the Zionist Union in the 120-seat Knesset parliament. Likud ended up with 30 seats – a quarter of Knesset mandates – compared with the Zionist Union’s 24.

Assuming the polls were indeed an accurate reflection of voter intentions, Mr Netanyahu’s success in turning a four-seat deficit into a six-seat lead over the last few days of the campaign marks a truly remarkable achievement for an astute politician who knew exactly which buttons to press to persuade right-wing and wavering voters to vote for him.

Media blitz

His media blitz stressed that only a strong Likud could prevent the emergence of a left-wing government backed by the newly-formed Arab Joint List. On election day he erroneously said Israeli Arabs were “voting in droves”. It was the politics of fear, and it worked. The swing to Likud over the last few days was unprecedented.

Yesterday, after praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem’s old city, Mr Netanyahu said he felt “honoured by the responsibility that the Israeli people placed on my shoulders against all the odds”.

He will now serve his fourth term as prime ministe and is set to overcome David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first premier, as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

The campaign was always portrayed as a vote of confidence in Netanyahu and he received an overwhelming endorsement from the public, despite the high cost of living; spiraling house prices; security threats from Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon; chaos on the Syrian border; and the deadlocked peace process with the Palestinians.

Potential coalition partners

Yesterday he began contacts with potential coalition partners from right-wing and religious parties, having stated that he intended to wrap up the negotiations within three weeks. This time the contacts should be relatively smooth and the potential coalition partners are obvious.

The far-right Jewish Home (eight seats) and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (six seats), together with the two ultra-Orthodox parties Shas (seven seats) and United Torah Judaism (six seats), along with the new centrist party Kulanu (10 seats) led by former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, will give Mr Netanyahu a relatively stable and homogeneous coalition of 67 Knesset members. Even before the campaign was over, Mr Netanyahu offered Mr Kahlon the key finance portfolio.

The victory has restored Likud’s dominance of Israeli politics while shoring up Mr Netanyahu’s position in Likud and the right-wing bloc as a whole.