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Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister after 12 years in power, hoped Tuesday’s elections would finally allow him to unite a stable right-wing coalition behind him, after three inconclusive elections since 2019.
FILE: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gives a press conference in Jerusalem on August 13, 2020. Image: AFP
JERUSALEM – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies do not have the parliamentary seats necessary to form a majority coalition, the results of this week’s elections showed on Thursday, when the vote count came to an end.
The central electoral committee said it had counted nearly 100% of the votes in Tuesday’s vote, and the results indicated a 59-seat bloc for right-wing and religious parties that would join a Netanyahu-led coalition, two seats down. than most. .
Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister after 12 years in power, hoped Tuesday’s elections would finally allow him to unite a stable right-wing coalition behind him, after three inconclusive elections since 2019.
His party has once again emerged as the largest in parliament, winning 30 seats out of 120 in the Knesset.
The astute 71-year-old politician said he would “exclude no one” in his efforts to form a coalition, with Mansour Abbas, leader of the conservative four-seat Islamic Raam party, indicating that he was open to supporting a Jewish organization led by the Netanyahu coalition. right-wing under certain terms.
But on Thursday, the head of the religious Zionism list, Bezalel Smotrich, said that “there will be no right-wing government supported by Abbas,” effectively closing the door to a possible union between Israel’s Islamist and religious Jewish parties.
Meanwhile, the “anyone but Netanyahu” bloc won 61 seats, but a coalition of right-wing parties opposed to the prime minister joining forces with the left and the Arab Joint List was unlikely.
Gideon Saar, a veteran politician who resigned from Netanyahu’s Likud in December to lead the New Hope party, which won six seats, said Thursday that it was “clear that Netanyahu does not have a majority to form a government under his leadership.”
“Steps must now be taken to realize the possibility of forming a government for change,” he wrote on Twitter. “As I announced on Election Night: Ego will not be a consideration.”
The vote count will be completed on Friday morning, and the final result will be officially presented to President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday.
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