After 3 elections, Israel seeks ways to avert 4th
JERUSALEM — With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters for another term outnumbered by lawmakers who want him gone, Israel’s political system — having cranked through the motions of a third election in less than a year only to produce another stalemate — began grappling Wednesday with what to do next.
A nearly complete vote count showed Netanyahu’s coalition of right-wing and religious parties with 58 seats in the 120-seat Parliament, three short of a governing majority.
That leaves Israel more or less back at square one — except that Netanyahu’s trial on felony corruption charges starts March 17, his opponents appear exhausted by a campaign in which he outclassed them to achieve a solid plurality and no one in the country appears willing to contemplate a fourth ballot.
Netanyahu’s Likud party sought to maximize its leverage as the largest faction to emerge from Monday’s election, floating the possibility of its recruiting right-leaning lawmakers from the mostly left-leaning LaborGesher-Meretz alliance or from the centrist Blue and White party, headed by the former army chief Benny Gantz, who was Netanyahu’s leading challenger.
But just one defector — whose political career could be ended, analysts said, by such a betrayal of the voters who elected him or her — would be a lot to ask. Three would seem a miracle, even for Netanyahu.
And the likeliest candidates to be wooed by Netanyahu all insisted they were holding fast to their promises to see him into retirement and could not be bought off, no matter the inducement.
The anti-Netanyahu forces, for their part, showed some new fight Wednesday. Lawmakers from all three center-left parties said they would propose or support legislation to bar Israel’s president from asking a lawmaker under indictment to form a government.
Ofer Shelah, of Blue and White, said the party would pursue measures in Parliament
to block Netanyahu from serving as prime minister. He noted that Israeli law now prohibits someone under indictment from serving as an ordinary government minister but does not specifically address the prime minister’s position.
“We believe such a law is worthy,” Shelah said.