Israeli parties scramble for coalition partners
The results of Israel’s too-close-to-call election won’t be final for days. But it has already sparked a tumultuous scramble among political parties — desperate to manufacture a governing majority and avoid yet another election — for potential coalition partners, defectors and spoilers.
With both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the parties determined to unseat him falling short of the 61 parliamentary seats needed for a majority coalition, according to preliminary results Wednesday, all sides were looking to the few swing factions.
Former Defense Minister Naftali Bennett, a Netanyahu rival who hasn’t ruled out bringing his Yamina party into the prime minister’s fold, was beseeched by pleas from both sides, but he remained mum on his intentions a day after Tuesday’s election.
Netanyahu’s Likud party pressured other former members who had joined a new right-wing party called New Hope to return. “It won’t happen,” declared Ze’ev Elkin, one of the targeted New Hope party members, in a radio interview.
The biggest reach may be the suggestion by some Likud members that a partnership with the small Islamist party United Arab List could put Netanyahu’s coalition into the majority
and eliminate the need for Israelis to return to other polls for the fifth time since the spring of 2019.
“It is our duty to do everything we can to prevent a fifth election,” coalition chairman Miki Zohar told the media site Ynet. Some members of Netanyahu’s bloc have previously pledged never to serve in government with an Arab party.
The Islamist United
Arab Party gained enough votes to clear the Knesset threshold with five seats.
“We’re prepared to hold talks with both sides,” Abbas said Wednesday in a radio interview.