Your Israeli Elections Questions, Answered
Plus: Read my profile of Israeli opposition co-leader Yair Lapid
Polls close shortly in Israel at 10pm local time, or 3pm Eastern time. In the past few days, I’ve received questions about this latest campaign from readers across the globe, from America to Israel to Iran. Here’s my attempt to answer as many of them as possible.
Who will win?
I report on the present, not the future, and so try to avoid making predictions—especially about the Middle East, which has a way of embarrassing even the sharpest prognosticators. For those wondering what we might see, Anshel Pfeffer has gamed out the different possible outcomes of the election, while Eylon Aslan-Levy has a much more extensive list of possibilities, including more fringe prospects. And then there’s this scenario from Aiden Pink at The Forward:
The world wins. Faced with the prospect of voting for the third time in a year, Israelis pray for a miracle, with a power and unity the likes of which haven’t been seen in millennia. This causes the arrival of the Messiah, who is unanimously appointed prime minister and deputy minister of transportation.
How do you win?
The Israeli Knesset is comprised of 120 seats, meaning a potential prime minister must control 61 of them to govern. This generally means cobbling together a coalition of their own party and several smaller ones. Typically, after an election, Israel’s president asks the leader of each party who they recommend as prime minister, and then gives first crack at forming a coalition to whoever gets the most support. If that person fails to form a coalition, the mandate is usually returned to the president, who then anoints another option.
The method for winning an Israeli election, then, is two-fold: (1) Getting 61 seats for your bloc, (2) Being the biggest party of that bloc. The leader of that party then becomes prime minister.
I thought Netanyahu won the last election. Why is this happening again?
The reason Israel is repeating its April election right now is that Netanyahu was only able to marshal 60 seats last time for his potential coalition, one short of a majority. He was stymied by former ally Avigdor Lieberman, who refused to bring his nationalist party into the government. In other words, Bibi didn’t fulfill both criteria for victory.
Rather than return the mandate to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, thus giving the opposition Blue & White a chance to form a government, Netanyahu instead called a successful vote to dissolve the new Knesset entirely and go to new elections, in hopes of a better outcome.
The fact that Netanyahu failed to muster a coalition last time complicates Rivlin’s choice this time. If Likud and Blue & White tie or are separated by just one or two seats, and Netanyahu still doesn’t have the necessary numbers on his side, Rivlin may give Blue & White head Benny Gantz a chance first. Or Netanyahu may fail to form a coalition again and be forced to pass the baton to Gantz.
When will we know who won?
The voting booths close at 10pm, Israel time, at which point exit polls will be released (but see below for more on those). By early Wednesday morning in Israel, most votes should be tabulated—aside from those of soldiers and overseas diplomats—and we should have a sense of the results. But that doesn’t mean we’ll know who won, because as noted above, getting the votes is only half the battle. Once they are in, the coalition wrangling begins, and that could result in anything from another Netanyahu government, to a rotation between Gantz and Netanyahu, or even Netanyahu being deposed by Likud. (For more on all this, click through to the scenarios linked to above.) But the short answer is that unless Netanyahu pulls off a decisive right-wing victory, we won’t necessarily know who “won” the election for some time.
Can I trust the exit polls?
Probably not. The polls do not cover the last two hours of voting, which in the past is when right-wing voters tend to surge. Back in 2015, thanks to the exits, Israelis went to bed thinking Likud was tied with the opposition Zionist Camp. When they woke up, and the votes had been counted, they discovered that Likud had actually won a decisive six-seat victory.
An additional complicating factor for the exit polls is that there are several parties on the right and left that are currently polling close to the electoral threshold. If they get 3.25% of the vote, they will get in, and if not, their votes will be wasted and the other parties will get their seats boosted proportionally. Because the numbers involved at the threshold are so small, they can be tipped by any number of late ballots from soldiers or diplomats, rendering the exit polls moot. In April’s election, for example, the New Right party hovered at the threshold for some time, before ultimately not making it into the Knesset. In other words, the make-up of the next Knesset might not be so quickly determined.
What does this election mean for Israeli democracy?
A lot. On the table is Netanyahu’s campaign promise to annex significant portions of the West Bank, which would dash all but the faintest hopes for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Such moves would put Israel on the path to choosing between being a binational democracy for all citizens or a Jewish state in which millions of Palestinians are permanently disenfranchised with no prospect for a state of their own.
The election also has implications for rule of law in Israel itself. Netanyahu is under indictment for multiple corruption cases, and is seeking a coalition that will pass a law to immunize himself from prosecution while in office. To date, he has failed to muster sufficient support even among the right for such a measure. The opposition parties certainly will not accord it to him in any national unity coalition. But should Bibi garner a 61-seat right wing victory, expect him to push hard for such legislation.
Finally, there is the effect of the campaign on Israel’s civil discourse. Over the last year, Netanyahu has been putting increasing pressure on Israeli democratic institutions—attacking the judiciary and police investigating him, the media reporting on him, and the validity of the very election he is running in. When the most powerful person in the country keeps mainlining that sort of distrust in liberal democratic institutions to their supporters, it leaves a mark. The more Bibi succeeds, the more this sort of thinking and rhetoric will become mainstream. If he is forced into a more centrist government, or otherwise defeated, these trends will be arrested (as, potentially, will Netanyahu). If not, he will have increasing free rein to accelerate them.
And of course, the Israeli opposition has an entirely different plan for the country, about which you can read more in my profile of their co-leader Yair Lapid.
Why are some Israelis calling journalists “pickles” on social media?
As you may recall, I published a Hebrew critique of Netanyahu in the Israeli press that did not go over well with some of his supporters.
I’m not the only journalist who has been hit with this epithet, and some folks have been wondering why. It all goes back to a speech that Netanyahu gave in 2017, when he criticized the Israeli media as a bunch of pickles for their constant negative reporting, and their refusal—in his eyes—to acknowledge all the positive achievements of his government. Essentially, he used the Hebrew word for pickles—חמוצים—figuratively to mean “sour puss” or “sour grapes.” Ever since, it has stuck as a term of insult among his loyalists on the Israeli right. Google Translate, however, doesn’t quite grasp the nuances, hence the amusing literal rendering above.
My interview with Blue & White co-leader Yair Lapid
Most of the coverage of this election has understandably revolved around Benjamin Netanyahu, the titanic political personality who has dominated Israeli politics for the last decade. But equally important is the vision put forward by the opposition, which has received less attention amidst an election cast as a referendum on Bibi. To remedy that, I talked to Yair Lapid, co-leader of the Blue & White party with Benny Gantz, and who would share the prime ministership should they emerge victorious. Read the whole thing here.
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