Tel Aviv: Neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition nor the grouping of Zionist parties hoping to remove him from office have come close to a majority in the Israeli parliament, setting the stage for days and possibly weeks of horse-trading, according to exit poll results.
Netanyahu’s Likud outperformed many pre-election opinion surveys to emerge as Israel’s single biggest party after an energetic election-day effort to drive the party’s traditional conservative supporters to the polls.
A surge in voter turnout from Arab-Israeli voters has seen the two Arab party lists on track to win 17 or 18 seats in the Israeli parliament, up from 10 in the last elections in 2022.
The exit poll from Israel’s Channel 12, one of the main networks, shows the opposition bloc scoring 52 seats, Netanyahu’s bloc 50 and the Arab parties 18.
Sixty-one seats are required to form a majority in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, although it is possible to serve in a minority government.
This is a significant decline for Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc given it won 64 seats at the most recent elections in 2022. But it is not the definitive repudiation that the anti-Netanyahu Zionist opposition had been hoping for in the first elections since the October 7 massacre of 2023.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief who emerged as Benjamin Netanyahu’s top rival, leapt upon the results to claim they showed voters wanted a change.
“The initial exit poll results indicate a total vote of no confidence in Netanyahu and his October 7 government by the Zionist majority and the majority of Israel’s citizens,” Eisenkot said in a statement.
“If these are the final results, this is a victory for Israel’s civic-minded Zionist majority.
“I will act immediately to implement the people’s verdict, replace Netanyahu’s government, and form a Zionist government committed to military conscription as soon as possible.”
If no leader can form a government, then Israelis will return to elections again, as happened repeatedly between 2019 and 2022.
More to come