Just two hours before presenting his exit vote, since the vote ended in the Israeli elections, Channel 13 pollster Kamil Fuchs said he “has never seen such dramatic and decisive results”.
Dramatic, they may have been. Decisive, they were not. After two years of turmoil and paralysis, after the fourth election in two years, they did not point to a smooth and clear way out of Israel’s political crisis.
Published at 10 pm, Fuchs’ exit poll, as well as exit polls submitted by rival channels 11 and 12, achieved the extraordinary feat of unanimously predicting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be able to retain power by bringing together restricted as many as possible – 61 of the 120 Knesset seats – as long as he managed to attract Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party to his coalition.
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In contrast to the endless polls on the run for election day, TV polls are historically quite accurate – give or receive a seat or two here or there. And therein lies the problem. A seat or two moving here or there can change everything.
And so it was proved: within three hours of the 10 pm poll, Fuchs had corrected his findings and now showed a 60-60 stalemate between the pro and anti-Netanyahu camps, while Channel 12 had the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead, 61-59. More changes seemed certain as the actual votes began to be counted – a process that could take several hours, or even, whisper, days.
Based on the polls, Netanyahu’s Likud performed reasonably well, dropping from 36 seats in last year’s election to 30-33 – despite having to contend with the additional challenge of his own former Likud ministerial colleague, Gideon Sa ‘ar, who split up to organize the New Hope party. New Hope appears to have been one of the biggest losers on election day, reaching just five or six seats when it was in both elections earlier this month. Bennett’s Yamina also stuck, with 7 to 8 seats – having been chased relentlessly by Netanyahu in the final days of the campaign.
Netanyahu’s trusted allies – the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the new Religious Zionism alliance – significantly outperformed pre-election polls, however, bringing 22-23 seats between them. If these results are true, one of the big winners of these elections is extreme right-wing religious Zionism, which includes the Otzma Yehudit party, led by Itamar Ben Gvir, an adherent of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane. All three polls showed religious Zionism winning 6-7 seats, which would mean a place in the Knesset not only for Ben Gvir, but also for Avi Maoz, the overtly anti-LGBT representative of the extremist Noam movement.
Netanyahu brokered the alliance of religious Zionism, paving Otzma Yehudit’s path to parliament, but later said he would not include its 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 indicated that he would seek a ministerial position; at the head of a party with six or seven members, he could demand that the Ministry of Justice advance the legislation he had already promised to stop Netanyahu’s corruption trial and attempt a radical “reform” of Israel’s judiciary.
The exit polls point to successes in the anti-Netanyahu field as well, with Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, Labor and Meretz all outperforming the latest polls.
Yair Lapid’s main opposition party, Yesh Atid, appears to have performed a little worse than expected, with 17-18 seats – partly because he did not try to take votes from Labor and Meretz. And the conservative Islamic party Ra’am has been seen below the threshold in all three election polls, its withdrawal from the Joint List apparently a failure.
Depending on the final results, Netanyahu may try to uproot a deserter or three from rival parties. But other party leaders can also try to galvanize all sorts of other coalitions; as soon as Channel 12 put the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead, Lapid promised to try to build a “healthy government”.
Having grabbed power with his fingernails after not decisively winning three elections in 2019 and 2020, Netanyahu knows that his worldwide vaccination campaign was instrumental in his and Likud’s performance this time, although it may not have provided a decisive victory : 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 new daily COVID-19 cases below 1,000.
When the exit polls at 10 pm were published, Netanyahu hailed a “great victory for the right and Likud under my leadership”. But Netanyahu also knew that patience was still needed. He hopes the numbers will still change in his favor. His rivals hope that the final count will prove that all three 22:00 polls were wrong.
