NETANYAHU STARTS HUNT FOR POSSIBLE COALITION ALLIES.
In driver’s seat despite looming corruption trial
JERUSALEM • Benjamin
Netanyahu began trying to lure Israeli opposition MPS into joining his right-wing coalition on Tuesday night after a surprisingly strong election result saw him fall just short of an overall majority in parliament.
With 90 per cent of the vote counted, the prime minister’s Likud party was on course to win 36 parliamentary seats compared with 32
for Blue & White, the centrist party led by Benny Gantz, a
former army general.
Netanyahu and his rightwing allies looked likely to take a total of 59 seats — just two shy of the number needed for an overall majority.
The outcome was a remarkable comeback for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, who had been trailing in the polls for much of the campaign, and whose trial on corruption charges is due to begin on March 17.
“It is a victory against all the odds, because we had to face enormous forces,” Netanyahu told ecstatic Likud supporters at a victory rally in Tel Aviv. “This has been a very great victory for the right-wing camp, and particularly a great victory for us Likudniks.”
There were similar celebrations after the election in April 2019, when the rightwing bloc won 60 seats, but the prime minister was unable to form a government, and the country had to hold two more elections in the 11 months that followed.
Hours after polls closed, Netanyahu was drawing up strategies on how to get a coalition to 61 seats. There will likely be several weeks of negotiations. Likud officials said one option was to try to win over right-wing mem
bers of Blue & White, an unwieldy centrist coalition.
In an election night speech to dejected support
ers, Gantz pledged he’d hold
his party together and not allow Netanyahu to poach his MPS. The party would stay “strong, united and loyal to our path.”
Another route for Netanyahu could be to woo Avigdor Lieberman, a maverick secular-nationalist who served as his defence minister before turning against him. However, Lieberman is opposed to the ultra-orthodox Jewish parties allied with Netanyahu.
But Yariv Levin, a Likud
minister, cautioned against complacency. “Anyone who thinks that it will be easy to form a government is wrong,” he said.