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Netanyahu sweeps to victory in Israeli election Now comes the hard part for Netanyahu
(about 9 hours later)
TEL AVIV, Israel — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party won a clear and decisive victory in Israel’s parliamentary elections, paving the way for him to serve a record-breaking fourth term as prime minister, according to an almost complete vote count Wednesday. TEL AVIV, Israel — At his victory celebration early Wednesday, supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began to chant, “You are the magician!”
Netanyahu and Likud overcame a strong challenge from his main opponent, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog. After a resounding clutch-time comeback in Israel’s parliamentary elections, Netanyahu is poised to serve a record fourth term as prime minister. If he makes it through the full four-year term, his time in office could exceed that of Israel’s longest-serving leader, the country’s founder, David Ben-Gurion.
“Against all odds, we achieved a great victory,” Netanyahu told his supporters in a packed hall in Tel Aviv about 1 a.m. Wednesday. “Now we have to form a strong and stable government.” Netanyahu will form his next government after a bruising campaign that exposed him to charges of racism and hysteria, for his complaint that “droves”of Arab Israeli citizens were voting and his warning that his opponents would welcome the militant Islamist group Hamas to the edges of Jerusalem.
Israelis expected a possibly long and drawn-out struggle between Netanyahu and his challenger, with both men and their parties claiming the mantle of leadership and trying to form governing coalitions. On Wednesday, Netanyahu and his Likud party began negotiating a new coalition government, which will probably be buttressed by nationalists, religious Zionists, populist former Likudniks, the pro-settlement camp, and two religious parties that represent ultra-Orthodox Jews and are overseen by powerful rabbis.
Herzog conceded the election in a telephone call to Netanyahu Wednesday morning. [How Netanyahu won — and what happens now]
“I wished him luck, but let it be clear: The problems are the same problems; nothing has changed,” Herzog told reporters outside his home. But the next Netanyahu government will face a host of challenges at home, on its borders and abroad. On Monday, in the heat of the campaign, Netanyahu made the sensational promise that he would not support the creation of a Palestinian state as long as he was prime minister, a stunning reversal of his earlier stance supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Netanyahu and Likud took 30 seats in the 120-seat parliament, easily topping the 24 forecast for the center-left Zionist Union alliance of Herzog and his running mate, former peace negotiator Tzipi Livni. His announcement convinced many Netanyahu skeptics that this has been the prime minister’s true position all along and that he has wasted American time and patience by pretending to endorse two states. The creation of a Palestinian state was the focus of nine months of negotiations last year led by Secretary of State John F. Kerry.
Herzog and an alliance of Israeli Arab parties called the Joint List will now likely form the opposition in the next parliament. The Joint List parties finished with 14 seats, making them the third-largest vote-getters. Herzog promised that his Zionist Union will continue to serve as “an alternative in every area.” [Netanyahu win points to two more years of strained U.S.-Israel ties]
Likud’s gains nearly matched the total of 31 seats taken in the 2013 election in an alliance between Netanyahu’s party and a group led by Avigdor Lieberman, who became the country’s foreign minister. In 2013, Likud took 18 seats and Lieberman’s group gained 13. In Europe, leaders frustrated by more than four decades of military occupation in the West Bank and the repeated failures of peace talks have begun to openly debate employing sanctions against Israel to push for a sovereign Palestinian state, which Netanyahu now vows he would never allow.
Netanyahu said he had already begun to call potential coalition partners in Israel’s right and religious wings to discuss forming a new government. More trouble — in the guise of resolutions and condemnations of Israel’s human rights record — could await Netanyahu in the international community. The United Nations said Wednesday that it expects Israel to continue with the Middle East peace process to negotiate a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu has started discussions to bring the following into his coalition: Naftali Bennett and his Jewish Home party, composed of religious nationalists and the pro-settler camp; the populist and former Likud member and communications minister Moshe Kahlon; Lieberman, head of a small secular nationalist party whose base is dominated by Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union; and the leaders of two parties that represent Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish population. Reacting to Netanyahu’s win, the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah promised Wednesday to go to the International Criminal Court at The Hague on April 1 to press war crimes charges­ against Israeli soldiers and leaders, focusing on the civilian deaths during the 50-day war in Gaza during the summer and the continued construction of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
The election was closely watched in Washington, where relations are strained between Netanyahu and the White House after Netanyahu gave a speech to Congress two weeks ago opposing the Obama administration’s possible deal with Iran to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program. For his part, Netanyahu has said in the past that it is war crimes and terror attacks by Hamas that the United Nations should be condemning.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said late Tuesday that President Obama “remains committed to working very closely” with whoever wins the Israeli premiership. [What Netanyahu’s win means for the Palestinians]
In Lausanne, Switzerland, where Iran and the United States are holding nuclear talks, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described Netanyahu’s victory as a step “backwards” for Israel. The election was closely watched in Washington, where relations are strained between Netanyahu and the White House after the prime minister gave a speech to Congress two weeks ago opposing the Obama administration’s possible deal with Iran to rein in Tehran’s nuclear program.
“That will be difficult,” Zarif said in response to a shouted out question before he and Secretary of State John F. Kerry started a third day of meetings. Netanyahu, who has made the fight against a nuclear Iran the centerpiece of his foreign policy, will probably side with congressional Republicans again and clash with President Obama if Kerry secures what the prime minister considers “a bad deal.”
On Monday, Netanyahu announced that he would not support the creation of a Palestinian state as long as he was prime minister, a reversal of his earlier stance supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The creation of a Palestinian state was the focus of nine months of negotiations last year led by Kerry. In Lausanne, Switzerland, where Iran and the United States are holding nuclear talks, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described Netanyahu’s victory as a step “backwards” for Israel and the region.
The reelection of the 65-year-old Netanyahu will almost certainly undermine an already bad relationship between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu will probably not care what the Iranians say. He has called Iran’s leaders “wolves in sheep’s clothing” and said they answer not to their citizens but to Holocaust-denying ayatollahs committed to Israel’s annihilation.
The Palestinian leadership has threatened to go to the International Criminal Court at The Hague on April 1 to press war crimes charges against Israeli soldiers and leaders, focusing on civilian deaths during a 50-day war in the Gaza Strip last summer and the continued construction of Jewish-only settlements in the occupied West Bank. Kerry called Netanyahu on Wednesday morning to congratulate him. Israeli news media spent the day speculating on when Obama would phone. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and British Prime Minister David Cameron placed calls to Netanyahu on Wednesday.
“It is clear that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will form the next government, and for that, we say clearly that we will go to the Hague Tribunal,” top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told Agence France-Presse on Wednesday. “We will accelerate, continue and intensify” diplomatic efforts, he said. Netanyahu and Likud took 30 seats in the 120-seat parliament, against the 24 forecast for the center-left Zionist Union alliance of Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and his running mate, former peace negotiator Tzipi Livni.
Turnout was the highest since 1999, with almost 72 percent of eligible voters going to the polls. Leaders of the Arab parties suggested that Arab Israeli turnout reached 65 percent, far higher than in the country’s last national elections in 2013. The number of legislators from Arab parties will go from 11 to 14. Netanyahu’s victory represents a crushing defeat for his challengers, who believed themselves so close to a win, based on opinion surveys, that they were already negotiating cabinet appointments for their new government.
Netanyahu and Likud surged past the last round of pre-election opinion surveys on Friday that showed Likud trailing Herzog’s alliance by three or four seats. Herzog conceded the election in a telephone call to Netanyahu on Wednesday morning and later said that he would most likely focus on leading the opposition in parliament.
Before the vote, pundits were beginning to write the first drafts of Netan­yahu’s political obituary. Reporters asked him in interviews what he planned to do in retirement. “I wished him luck, but let it be clear: The problems are the same problems, nothing has changed,” Herzog told reporters.
But in the past five days, Netan­yahu took to the airwaves, warning repeatedly that Herzog and the left were going to turn over land to the Palestinians and divide Jerusalem, which both Israel and Palestinians claim as their capital. Herzog will be joined in the opposition by politicians from the Joint List of Arab parties, which won 14 seats, making it the third-largest vote-getter. Arabs represent about 20 percent of Israel’s population.
It was unclear whether Israeli pollsters just got it wrong or could not keep up with fast-moving events. The last opinion polls on Friday suggested that Netanyahu was losing. Exit polls Tuesday night said it was a tie. The final vote count showed that Netanyahu had won by a wide margin. As polls ahead of the vote showed Likud trailing the Zionist Union, the prime minister warned that he and his party were “in real danger,” that the left was about to win and to give away “land for peace” and “divide” Jerusalem; that unnamed “foreign powers” were pouring millions of dollars into a campaign against him; that Arab Israeli citizens were going to the polls “in droves,” bused by nongovernmental organizations dedicated to his downfall.
Leading pollster Avi Degani, president of the Geocartography Knowledge Group, said Wednesday that there were several reasons for the disparity. Netanyahu also promised that there would be “no concessions” to the Palestinians and “no withdrawals” from the West Bank during his watch. He appeared Monday at the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in East Jerusalem to highlight his commitment to continued construction. Europe and the United Nations say that the settlements in Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegal under international law. Israel disputes this.
“We are not looking for excuses, but in Israel we are always dealing with 20 percent of the voters who have not made a decision before the election and you just do not know who they will vote for,” he said. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism in the United States and a major leader of American Jewry, condemned Netanyahu’s last-ditch tactics as “a naked appeal to his hard-right bases’ fears rather than their hopes.”
Degani also said that many Israeli pollsters had used the Internet and not the telephone to carry out their surveys, essentially alienating a large bulk of traditional Likud supporters who are not on the Internet. Whatever one calls it, it appears to have worked. Avi Degani, a leading Israeli pollster and president of the Geocartography Knowledge Group, said Wednesday that the last opinion polls showing a possible Likud loss not only motivated Netanyahu but also caused panic among reluctant voters on the right, pushing them to vote for Likud at the last minute out of fear that the left wing would take over.
He also speculated that the last polls showing Herzog’s party with a growing lead over Netanyahu may have caused panic among hesitant voters, pushing them to vote for Likud at the last minute out of fear that the left wing would win. Gil Hoffman, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, said Netanyahu mobilized voters from what he called “the second Israel,” who came out to protect Israel from the left, from Iran and what they perceive as a hostile international community.
Gil Hoffman, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, said Netanyahu mobilized voters from what he called “the second Israel,” who came out to protect Israel from the left, from Iran and a hostile international community. In an editorial titled “King Bibi and his divided people,” David Horovitz, the founding editor of the Times of Israel news Web site, called Netanyahu “a political tactician in a different league from his rivals.”
“It’s a big victory for the Likud,” said Likud member Danny Danon, a former deputy defense minister. “This is a win for the right, and all my friends on the left need to acknowledge this win.” “But amid the euphoria of victory, and the majority’s reaffirmation of faith in his leadership, will he take heed of the fact that a substantial proportion of the electorate is as shocked and horrified by Tuesday’s results as he and his supporters are shocked and delighted?” Horovitz asked.
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will now ask party leaders to come to his residence and signal to him whom they want to lead the next coalition government. Carol Morello in Lausanne, Switzerland, contributed to this report.
The linchpin of a possible Netanyahu-led government now appears to be Kahlon, a former Likud minister who left that party to form his own, called Kulanu, which won nine or 10 seats, according to exit polls. Kahlon tweeted that it was a “great success.” Netanyahu sweeps to victory in Israeli election
Kahlon became popular with voters after he broke up cellphone monopolies and the prices­ for mobile minutes plummeted. His party’s candidates include Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States, who rebuked Netanyahu for addressing Congress in the polarizing speech on Iran this month. How did Israel’s pollsters miss Netanyahu’s reelection?
Before the election, Kahlon refused to say whether he would join a coalition led by Netanyahu or Herzog. But with a strong finish by Netanyahu, most analysts now assume he will side with Netanyahu, because ­Kahlon’s politics are more closely aligned with Likud than with Labor. For supporters of Israel’s Herzog, hope fades to despair overnight
As voting was underway Tuesday, Netanyahu said his government was “in danger,” notably from a turnout of Arab Israeli voters. The alarm from Netanyahu reflected the tight margins in his bid to hold back a surging challenge from Herzog, 54, the son of a former president and grandson of a prominent rabbi.
Ruth Eglash contributed to this report. Daniela Deane in Rome and Carol Morello in Lausanne, Switzerland, contributed to this report.