Barely two hours before he presented his exit poll when the vote in the Israeli election ended, Kamil Fuchs, Channel 13 poller, stated that he had “never seen such dramatic and decisive results.”
Dramatically, it was possible. Definitely, they were not. After two years of unrest and paralysis, after the fourth election in two years, they did not point to a smooth, clear path out of Israel’s political crisis.
Fuchs’ exit poll, as well as the exit polls published by rival Channel 11 and 12, achieved the extraordinary feat by unanimously predicting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be able to retain power by creating the narrowest pattern. possible majority – 61 of the 120 seats in the Knesset – provided he could win Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party in his coalition.
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Unlike the endless polls in the run-up to Election Day, the TV exit polls are generally pretty accurate – give or take a place or two here or there. And there’s the rub. A seat or two moving here or there can change everything.
And so it proved: within three hours of the 22-hour recordings, Fuchs changed his findings and now shows a 60-60 stalemate between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps, while Channel 12 the anti-Netanyahu -camp ahead, 61-59. More shifts were certainly because the actual voices began to pick up – a process that could take several hours, or even whispers, days.
Based on the exit polls, Netanyahu’s Likud performed fairly well, declining from 36 seats in last year’s election to 30-33 – despite facing the extra challenge of his former Likud ministerial colleague, Gideon Sa’ar, who broke away had to fend off. to set up the New Hope party. It looks like New Hope was one of the biggest losers on election day and only five or six seats were on the way when it voted twice as much earlier this month. Bennett’s Yamina also came to a standstill with 7-8 seats – after Netanyahu was relentlessly targeted in the final days of the campaign.
Netanyahu’s trusted allies – the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the new alliance on religious Zionism – performed significantly better than the pre-election polls, but they collected 22-23 seats between them. If these results are true, far-right religious Zionism, which includes the Otzma Yehudit party led by Itamar Ben Gvir, a supporter of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane, is one of the very big winners of this election. All three polls showed that religious Zionism won 6-7 seats, which would not only mean a place in the Knesset for Ben Gvir, but also for Avi Maoz, the former anti-LGBT representative of the extremist Noam. -movement.
Netanyahu mediated the alliance between Religious Zionism and paved Otzma Yehudit’s path to parliament, but then said he would not include his members in his government. If the final results give him a path to re-election that depends on Ben Gvir, he may have no choice.
Ben Gvir has indicated he will seek ministerial office; at the head of a party that is six or seven strong, he can demand from the Ministry of Justice to promote legislation he has already promised to stop Netanyahu’s corruption trial, and to bring about a radical ‘reform’ of the Israeli judiciary to try to do.
The exit polls also point to successes in the anti-Netanyahu camp, with Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, Labor and Meretz outperforming the latest polls.
Yair Lapid’s main opposition party, Yesh Atid, apparently fared a little worse than expected, with 17-18 seats – in part because he did not try to draw votes from Labor and Meretz. And the conservative Islamic party Ra’am has been seen below the threshold in all three exit polls, and apparently a failure of the joint list.
Depending on the final results, Netanyahu may try to bounce an overlap or three from rival parties. But other party leaders may also try to galvanize all sorts of other coalitions; Channel 12 had previously placed the anti-Netanyahu camp as Lapid promised to try to form a ‘healthy government’.
After clinging to his fingernails to power after failing to win three decisions in 2019 and 2020, Netanyahu will know that his world-beating vaccination goal was central to his and Likud’s performance this time around, though it may not be a decisive victory did not deliver: The elections took place on a day when the number of serious COVID-19 cases in Israel fell below 500 for the first time in three months, and with the daily new COVID-19 cases now below 1,000.
When the exit polls were published at 10pm, Netanyahu praised a “big win for right-wingers and Likud under my leadership”. But Netanyahu also knew that patience was still in order. He will hope that the numbers will still move to his advantage. His competitors will hope that the final scores will prove that all three polls were wide of 22:00.
