With the release of the final election results Thursday night, the extent of the political parties’ self-aggravated defeat against Netanyahu became clear, as the final vote counts showed just 30,293 votes, dividing opposing political camps.
Although that gap accounts for less than one Knesset seat, based on the total number of valid votes cast in the election, the new coalition with 64 of the 120 seats in the new Knesset will have a decisive eight-seat majority.
According to the final result, the right-wing religious alliance of Likud, Religious Zionism, Shas and United Torah Judaism parties received a total of 2,303,964 votes.
Together with the votes received by Jewish Home that did not exceed the 3.25 percent hurdle, the total number of votes cast for all parties that have joined the political bloc of new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rises to 2,360. 757. (Jewish Home leader Ayelet Shaked, formerly of Yamina and interior minister of the outgoing coalition, promised during the campaign that if her new party made it into the Knesset, she would ally with Netanyahu’s bloc.)
The eight parties of the so-called “anti-Netanyahu bloc” — comprised of the outgoing coalition parties, along with the majority Arab Hadash-Ta’al and Balad — achieved near parity with 2,330,464 votes.
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This includes 288,789 votes cast for the left-wing Meretz and anti-Zionist Balad parties, both of which did not cross the electoral threshold.
Supporters of the Meretz party react to the announcement of the results of Israel’s elections on November 1, 2022 in Jerusalem. (Flash90)
Meretz received a total of 150,696 votes, or 3.16% of the vote, and was just 4,124 votes short of crossing the electoral threshold and entering the Knesset.
Balad received 138,093 votes, which is about 2.9% of the total votes.
These 288,789 votes add up to more than seven Knesset seats in a raw calculation of the number of votes constituting a mandate based on the total number of valid votes cast. (However, this does not automatically mean 7 more seats given the complex calculations by which seats are allocated – which involve parties clearing and falling below the threshold, and involving “overvote” agreements between parties crossing the threshold. )
Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, with his wife Sara at his side, addresses supporters at the party’s campaign headquarters in Jerusalem early November 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Tsafrir Abayov)
Had Meretz run on a joint list with Labour, as she intended and as outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid called for, and had Balad not opted to break away from Hadash-Ta’al and stand alone, it would be likely the splitting of seats in the new Knesset would have denied the Netanyahu bloc the absolute majority it has now won. (Probably, but not certain, as there are no guarantees that voters would have made the decisions they made, or voted at all, if Labor and Meretz had merged and Balad had not run alone.)
Still, it would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the anti-Netanyahu parties to form a coalition of their own, since Hadash-Ta’al, and in particular the Arab nationalist Balad, would almost certainly not have joined a government.
Members of the Balad party at the party headquarters in Shefaram, northern Israel, on November 1, 2022, as the results of Israel’s general elections are announced. (Michael Giladi/Flash90)
Despite strong pressure from Lapid on Meretz and Labor to unite on a pre-election list to prevent either left-wing party falling below the threshold, Lapid leader Merav Michaeli adamantly refused to do so.
Lapid reportedly offered both Lapid and Meretz reserved spots on his Yesh Atid party’s electoral list and guaranteed Lapid ministerial posts as part of his efforts to get the parties to unite, but Michaeli then accused Lapid of harming the centre-left bloc to inflict efforts.
Balad, who ran on a joint list with at least one other Arab party in the last five elections, withdrew from a similar agreement just an hour before the Sept. 15 deadline for submitting party lists to the Central Elections Committee.
In contrast, Netanyahu brokered a far-right merger between Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism Party, Itamar Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit Party and Avi Maoz’s Noam Party – all running under the Religious Zionism banner and winning a total of 14 seats from the third largest voter after Likud and Yesh Atid. There had been concerns in the Netanyahu bloc that otherwise Smotrich’s party might not have crossed the threshold, and Noam was not expected to attract more than a few tens of thousands of votes.
Leader of the religious Zionist party Bezalel Smotrich at the party’s campaign headquarters after election day, November 1, 2022. (Yossi Aloni/Flash90)
Netanyahu chose not to offer Shaked any direct incentive to drop out of the race, despite consistently polling below the threshold, but controversial reports this week claimed that the Likud had concluded Shaked’s Jewish Home Party was not a threat to Netanyahu bloc because it is to gain some of his limited support from voters who would otherwise have voted against Netanyahu.
In the April 2019 elections, a similar sequence of events on the right deprived Netanyahu’s camp of the votes needed to form a government.
In that election, both former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s New Right Party and Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut Party failed to clear the ballot box, wasting more than 256,000 votes in the process.
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