A key Charedi party has declined to back Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister during post-election meetings with Israeli President Herzog.
United Torah Judaism, which won seven Knesset seats in last week’s vote, refused to endorse any candidate despite its longtime alliance with Netanyahu’s Likud.
Both of the party's factions, Degel HaTorah and Agudat Yisrael, were instructed by their respective leading rabbis to endorse neither the incumbent prime minister nor his main rival, Yashar’s Gadi Eisenkot.
While Shas, Israel’s other main Charedi party, did back Netanyahu, UTJ’s decision means that his coalition bloc has only 46 seats, well short of the 61 needed to form a majority.
Eisenkot’s bloc, meanwhile, has 56 seats thanks to the backing of Beyachad, the Democrats, Yisrael Beiteinu and, significantly, the Arab-Israeli Ra’am party.
As such, he only needs the support of five MKs from the other major Arab faction, the Joint List, which holds 11 seats.
Alternatively, given the objections within his coalition, particularly from Yisrael Beiteinu, to working with the Joint List, the path remains open for Eisenkot to form a minority government, which could pass legislation as long as at least five Joint List MKs agree to abstain.
UTJ is also reportedly considering offering its support to an Eisenkot minority government on certain issues without formally joining the coalition, though clashes over Charedi conscription into the IDF are likely to continue.
Elsewhere during the consultations, Herzog rebuked members of the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, which did endorse Netanyahu, for airing unproven allegations of massive voter fraud among the Arab-Israeli community.
After Yitzhak Wasserlauf MK claimed in front of the president that the election had been “stolen,” Herzog replied: “You are citing hearsay; it is all speculation.
“In the legal world, things must be proven, and generalisations must be avoided. It is important to me that people exercise caution. Sometimes, definitive claims end up amounting to very little.”
Allegations of fraud, including interference by a “foreign power,” are being investigated by the Shin Bet, with the security agency saying that early evidence suggests that “foreign financing and influence activities involving enormous sums of money are a widespread phenomenon affecting thousands of people, possibly even more”.
Nonetheless, the Central Elections Committee has assured the public that, even if allegations of fraud are proven, they would not be of sufficient scale to materially impact the results, which were officially certified on Wednesday.
Herzog also criticised Wasserlauf for saying that his party had “no confidence” in Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who has been locked in a political row with Netanyahu’s governing coalition for months after ministers attempted to fire her, accusing her of using her position to block its right-wing agenda.
“The culture of discrediting public servants in state institutions is unacceptable,” he said.
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