BEnjamin Netanyahu and his putative coalition partners have an absolute majority of 64 of the 120 seats in the Knesset. According to the official result announced on Thursday evening, the Netanyahu-led Likud is the strongest party in the Israeli parliament with 32 seats. Next comes Prime Minister Jair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, which gets 24 seats. Lapid congratulated Netanyahu on his success over the phone. “Israel is above politics,” Lapid said; he strives for an orderly handover of official business.
The decisive factor for Netanyahu’s electoral success, which should enable the long-time head of government to return to the office of prime minister, was that several left-wing parties failed to make it into parliament. The secular Meretz party stayed just below the 3.25 percent hurdle, with 3.16 percent of the votes cast, according to official figures. Party leader Zehava Galon wrote on Twitter that this was a “disaster for Meretz, a disaster for the country and, yes, a personal disaster for me too.” Galon only returned to the office of party chairman in the summer after a leadership crisis in the party. Meretz has been represented in every parliament since 1992.
Galon criticized Lapid. Unfortunately, many supporters of her party followed his call to make Yesh Atid the strongest party and for this reason did not vote for Meretz. The leader of the Labor Party, who only just cleared the hurdle to enter parliament, leveled allegations at the incumbent prime minister. “Lapid wanted to wipe out the Labor Party,” said Merav Michaeli at a performance on Thursday. In addition, he had poorly organized the election campaign of the centre-left parties. Michaeli had itself drawn criticism for refusing to join forces with Meretz in an electoral alliance that Lapid, among others, had pushed for.