Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Photo GPO)
With almost two-thirds of the ballots counted it appears clear that former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will soon return to office after about a year and a half absence. Netanyahu already holds the record as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having been in power from 2009 to 2021 and before that from 1996 to 1999.
According to the latest count, at this hour the Netanyahu right-wing block will have as many as 69 seats in the Knesset, up ten seats from the previous elections.
A big winner is the right-wing party Religious Zionism led by the controversial Bezalel Smotrich and former Meir Kahane party supporter and activist Itamar Ben-Gvir.
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The biggest losers of the elections were clearly Israel’s Arab parties. In 2020, when running in one united party called simply the Joint List, they collectively earned 15 seats in the Knesset. In 2022 they ran as two separate parties and only had 10 Knesset seats between them. But this year they splintered again, running three separate lists for the Knesset, out of which, as of Wednesday morning, it seems that only one will pass the minimum threshold for entering the Knesset with just 4 seats.
Another big loser seems to be the left-wing Meretz party. At this time it seems that the party failed to pass the minimum threshold of 3.25% of the vote needed to enter the Knesset and may disappear after 30 years as one party (merged from 3) and more than 40 years from its original origins.
Another big winner is the Sephardic ultra-orthodox Shas Party which has won at least 10 seats in the Knesset and the ultra-orthodox in general with 17 seats in total.
In fact, the religious parties combined now have a quarter of the seats in the Knesset between them. However, many of the people who voted for Religious-Zionism were right-wing voters and not necessarily religious themselves.
Another big loser of these elections was Ayelet Shaked, former leader of the religious/right-wing parties Yamina and Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home). Those parties are gone now. Shaked lost her base of support after Yamina (literally “to the right”) won 6 seats in the elections of 2021. But Yamina – then led by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett – agreed to join a broad coalition with left-wing and Arab parties. This let Bennett be the prime minister of Israel for one year, but now he has quit politics and his party died a political death.
