For the fourth time in two years, on March 23, Israelis headed to the polls. Walking through Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, passersby saw grim-faced party leaders glaring down from billboards promoting their candidacies. All looked tough, prepared to combat COVID-19, strong enough to stand up to Iran. Israel’s incumbent Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud, or “Bibi” as he is colloquially known, appeared, from advertisements for his Likud party, with his face drawn into a tight, faint smile, his white hair slicked back neatly. His image seemed to declare that he alone led the world’s most successful vaccination campaign, he alone has the prior experience to contend with Israel’s enemies, he alone is responsible for diplomatically opening Israel to the Arab world, and he singularly possesses the necessary skills — the polished English, the political tact — to represent Israel on the international stage.
But a handful of other candidates promoted their own messages: Fifteen years in office have corrupted Netanyahu, they contended, and only new blood could save the country from Netanyahu’s iron grip. Optimistic party names — ranging from Tikva Chadasha to Yesh Atid, Hebrew for “New Hope” and “there is a future” respectively — reflected candidates’ visions of a post-Netanyahu Israel. Yet the splintered nature of Israeli politics, combined with Netanyahu’s political savvy, threatened to foil the anti-Netanyahu movement.
The 120 seats of the Israeli Knesset are proportionally divided amongst parties based upon the vote share each party receives in national elections. In order to function, the Knesset must have a 61-seat majority governing coalition with a Prime Minister at its head; if the governing coalition dissolves, Israelis head to the polls. Now that the elections are over, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will meet with party heads and select one party leader to build a coalition, based upon whom he deems most likely to succeed.
Over the past two years, political turmoil and a myriad of competing interests have broken two governing coalitions and resulted in two inconclusive elections. Election results from Tuesday’s fourth election indicate both Netanyahu and his rivals could face a daunting task to muster a majority coalition: Uniting sprawling political factions divided on security, religious issues, and opinions of Netanyahu is a tough feat.
In part, this is because Israel is a multicultural society composed of many different voting blocs; Hasidic Jews, religious-Zionist Jews, secular Israelis, Israeli-Arabs, and others support candidates who will provide funding to their communities and promote their favored public policies.
Despite differences on social and cultural issues, voting groups in Israel mostly share a right-wing security approach. Following the Oslo Accords’ failure, the second Intifada, and the 2005 Israeli disengagement from Gaza, which allowed Hamas to control the Gaza Strip, the Israeli electorate has shifted right. While Labor and Meretz — Israel’s two major left-wing parties — won 44 and 12 Knesset seats respectively in the 1992 election, they only hold seven seats in the current Knesset. In a country with a mandatory military draft and citizens wary of their enemies, a hard-line security approach dominates: refusing to grant concessions to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is commonplace.
With the collapse of the traditional left, new issues have taken center stage. While the traditional left-right spectrum on security and economic policy still exists, a different left-right coordinate system better describes the Israeli political landscape.
One important axis involves religion. Ultra-Orthodox parties like Shas and United Torah Judaism advocate for an expansive role of the Rabbinate, a continuation of the military-service exemption that serves their voters, more funding for ultra-Orthodox communities, and religious opposition to LGBTQ rights. Meanwhile, more secular parties like the leftist Meretz party and Avigdor Lieberman’s right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu support measures including drafting ultra-Orthodox Jews into the army, offering public transport on Shabbat, and civil marriage under the State’s jurisdiction.
A second important axis that explains contemporary Israeli politics is friendliness to Netanyahu. Indictments on cases of bribery and breach of public trust have tarnished Netanyahu’s reputation and galvanized opposition. In the past three elections, former Israeli Defense Forces chief-of-staff Benny Gantz led the opposition to Netanyahu. After the third election in March 2020, Gantz agreed to join Netanyahu’s coalition with a rotating Prime Minister position, citing the coronavirus pandemic as an extenuating factor to break his promise not to join a Netanyahu-led coalition. Gantz was slated to assume the Prime Minister position this November, but the governing coalition collapsed after an impasse on budget negotiations, triggering a fourth round of elections.
With his credibility as an anti-Netanyahu figure in pieces, Gantz no longer commands the opposition to Netanyahu. Instead, those against Netanyahu splintered to support other parties, like Yesh Atid led by Yair Lapid, a centrist party which was formerly merged with Gantz’s party; New Hope led by Gideon Sa’ar, a former Likud member who lost a Likud primary election to Netanyahu; and Naftali Bennett’s right-wing Yamina party. Sa’ar and Lapid have vowed not to join a coalition with Netanyahu; Bennett is noncommittal, but he has not ruled out joining a Likud-led coalition. Yet the last election indicated that campaign promises about coalition formation are fleeting; the political wheeling and dealing in coalition negotiations can lead politicians to renege on previous commitments in exchange for powerful portfolios.
Due to the sheer number of represented parties and the complexity of political calculations in the Knesset, Israeli politics operates on very thin margins, where even small parties can become major power players. Israeli law mandates that each party must receive a certain percentage of the vote to sit in Knesset. This threshold — currently at 3.25% of the national vote total — has consistently risen over the years as large parties sought to entrench themselves in Israeli politics. If parties fail to cross the electoral threshold to enter the Knesset, their votes are thrown out. This phenomenon has led to mergers between similar parties seeking to obtain the requisite share of the vote to qualify for seats in the Knesset.
Take the Religious Zionist Party, which Netanyahu helped merge with the Jewish-supremacist Otzma Yehudit party and the anti-LGBTQ Noam party, creating a larger party that crossed the electoral threshold and is a natural ally to join a Likud-led government. Three other small parties — Gantz’s Blue and White party, Meretz, and the United Arab List (UAL), also known as Ra’am, — succeeded at garnering 3.25% of the vote, complicating Netanyahu’s chances of assembling a governing coalition easily.
Election results show that a Likud-led government—composed of Likud, Yamina, and religious Jewish parties—will fall slightly short of 61 seat majority, winning around 59 seats. Netanyahu may manage to cobble together a coalition if he includes the conservative, Islamist Ra’am party — a sensible partner with like-minded, religious Jewish parties on social issues, but one the Religious Zionism party has vowed not to coalition with.
The anti-Netanyahu parties will also be hard-pressed to form a government because of ideological differences: uniting right-wing parties like New Hope with left-wing and Arab parties would be a difficult feat. Furthermore, no anti-Netanyahu politician inspires confidence as a political leader: Yair Lapid, the presumptive leader of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, had a whopping 75% disapproval rating as Minister of Finance in 2013. Forming either pro- or anti-Netanyahu governments would likely require support from either the Yamina party or Ra’am, making Yamina’s Naftali Bennett and Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas potential kingmakers.
All the ideological divisions along the axes governing Israeli politics will make forming a governing coalition difficult for whomever President Rivlin taps to form the next government. With so many political fault lines, the possibility of a fifth election looms large. While the billboards may come down now, they may not have time to gather dust.
Image Credit: Jacob Miller, HPR
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