Incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to announce the composition of Israel’s next governing coalition as early as today, ahead of the Saturday deadline imposed on him by Israeli law. The coalition math dictating Netanyahu’s decision-making has been more or less clear for weeks – and added up to 70 out of 120 seats in Israel’s Knesset, while excluding ultra-religious parties – with the only genuine drama revolving around the distribution of cabinet positions. Those issues appear to have been resolved.
The next coalition – with ministers likely to be sworn in Thursday – will be made up of Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu (31 seats), Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (19), Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home (12), Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua Party (6), and Kadima (2). Livni was the first to bring her party into the government, in which she will be the justice minister. The other likely appointments are Lapid is as finance minister, Bennett as minister of trade and industry, and Likud’s Moshe Ya’alon as defense minister. Netanyahu will hold the foreign affairs portfolio in anticipation of Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman returning to politics and accepting it. Lieberman resigned as foreign minister last December to face legal indictments.
Western analysts have struggled to cover Israel’s election and Netanyahu’s subsequent coalition negotiations. Punditry leading up to the January 22 election was, quipped Politico reporter Kevin Robillard, “not so great.” Despite converging polls and qualitative analysis showing that Israel’s center-right and center-left electoral blocs remained stable, with each drawing about half of the Israeli electorate, journalists widely predicted a hard-line lurch to the right. Major wires even reported that exit polls showed a win for “Netanyahu, hard-line allies.” Instead, as exit polls actually reflected, Israeli voters broadly empowered centrist politicians and parties.
Immediately after the election analysis pivoted away from assertions that Netanyahu would lead a dominant hard line right-wing government, to speculation that he might fail to cobble together a coalition. Such a failure would have been historically unprecedented — previous governments had emerged from similar electoral circumstances, Netanyahu’s party Likud-Beiteinu slate directly controlled roughly 25 percent of the newly elected Knesset, and the second place party had promised not to block efforts to create a coalition — but the theme persisted in media coverage.
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