With most of the votes counted in Israel on Wednesday afternoon, there were several surprises that awaited an electorate who had gone to bed on Tuesday night with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu looking set to form another unstable government.
The Arab party Ra’am had crossed the threshold needed to enter the Knesset and were set to pick up five seats. This made Ra’am party leader Mansour Abbas the man of the hour, in a sense. A historic triumph for the more Islamic-leaning of the numerous small parties that appealed to Arab voters in Israel, and which have traditionally played no role in governing coalitions. Abbas could change that, working with Netanyahu or with Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party got the second largest number of votes.
Abbas and his five seats are only one of the question marks after election night. Netanyahu’s Likud, which has governed for more than a decade, looks poised to grab 30 seats. This election is a true triumph for him because there were no other parties that even came close to that total.
Yesh Atid, the populist centrist party, has around 18 seats, according to the predicted final outcome.
That is the biggest story from election night, and one that was widely expected. Likud is now a giant in Israeli politics. Prior to this election, it usually had to contend with a large opposition, either from the Blue and White Party in the last three elections or a centre-left Labour-led party in 2015. But the overall writing was on the wall for the 2021 election if one looks at what happened in 2013, when a Likud-led slate got 31 seats and Yair Lapid got 19.
The big difference today is that Israel essentially has no centre-left opposition. The historic Labour party may end up with seven seats and the left-leaning Meretz with five. Israel’s politics today are basically divided between the religious and right wing parties and the centrist voters. Likud looms so large that several other parties in the Knesset are run by people who were once close to Netanyahu or in Likud. Gidon Sa’ar, for instance, created a breakaway New Hope party from Likud that will have some six seats in the next Knesset. Naftali Bennett, who runs the right-leaning Yamina party, was once Netanyahu’s Chief of Staff. Avigdor Lieberman was once Director-General of Likud and his Yisrael Beitnu party will likely have six seats in the next Knesset.
The thing to know about Israeli politics is this: there are 30 seats for Likud. The two Orthodox religious parties always get around 16 seats. The mostly Arab parties get 13 seats. The religious right, pro-settler parties, get around 10 seats. In essence, several of these blocks are sectarian. Orthodox and Arab voters historically vote only for their parties. There is a sea of votes for the secular right, the centrists and populists, and the declining left, and that is where the campaigning is done. It’s also the area in which Netanyahu has successfully outplayed his opponents to form coalitions.
Add it all up, and what you get is not just a Likud with 30 seats, but former Likud members running parties that got almost 20 seats. Likud is so dominant today that it has essentially given birth to the new Israeli politics. Even if Netanyahu seems to alienate most of his former colleagues and lieutenants in the party, or pack them off to exile in some faraway place so they don’t threaten him internally, he has essentially outplayed Israel’s parliamentary system.
How Netanyahu came to this point is by exploiting the failure of Israelis to create a real centrist party. Back in 2006, Netanyahu’s Likud only had 12 seats. He only barely formed a government in 2009, despite getting fewer votes than the centrist Kadima party. But what Netanyahu understood is that there are around 30 seats in the Knesset that are floating. Centrist voters from the more economically successful coastal plain of Israel will throw their votes at whoever campaigns for these thirty seats. But Netanyahu understood that centrist politics is ideologically empty and it tends to be a kind of “flavour-of-the-month” politics. That is why parties like Blue and White come and go, just like Kadima and the others.
Netanyahu ignores the divided centrist camp of voters and exploits the divisions among the religious and far right, knowing that they will refuse to sit with the left. His campaign is always the same, urging voters to keep a “right wing” government in power. In this election he shifted tactics a bit, trying to reach out to some Arab voters. This would surprise those who previously recall Netanyahu being accused of racism in 2015, when he warned on election day that “the Arabs are coming in droves to vote,” a dog whistle for the right wing to run to the polling booth.
Why did Netanyahu suddenly appear open to speaking to the Islamist Ra’am party? Because naturally Ra’am’s voters will weaken the other Arab parties which oppose Netanyahu. He can stir the pot and divide the Arab vote. He does the same thing with the rest of the vote in Israel, gambling on dividing it so that there is no united opposition. Then, when the elections are over, all he has to do is dangle some incentive in front of a few parties to form a coalition. His coalitions are unstable because he doesn’t want to share power.
A look back over the past decade illustrates that he has sat in coalition with most of those who today ostensibly oppose him. He ran with Lieberman in 2013, he even brought Kadima into the government in 2012, and Lapid in 2013. Gantz joined his coalition in 2020, only to be betrayed on budgetary issues, precipitating the latest election. It’s always the same story and Israelis have got used to it. That is why nothing seems to change, despite the four elections in two years.
