With 90% of votes counted, the Netanyahu bloc has 53 seats, compared to 48 for Eisenkot; Arab parties reach 19
The Central Election Commission (CEC) said Wednesday afternoon that with 89.8 percent of ballots counted, the bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was poised to win 53 seats in the 120-member Knesset, and the bloc led by Yashar Party Chairman Gadi Eisenkot would win 48 seats, leaving both blocs short of a 61-seat majority.
The two Arab-majority parties were poised to win a historic 19 seats between them, putting them in a potential kingmaker position, after Arab voters turned out in record numbers in Tuesday’s elections, hoping to oust Netanyahu and his far-right allies from the seat of power. Their previous record was 15 seats.
The picture that emerged Wednesday evening was different from that which had been painted in most mainstream polls in the weeks and months leading up to the election, which had almost all shown Eisenkot’s bloc taking the lead over Netanyahu’s by varying margins, but by the same token, with no one having a clear path to a coalition.
It’s also a reversal from exit polls released Tuesday night by major TV networks at the end of voting at 10 p.m., which showed Eisenkot’s bloc ahead of Netanyahu’s by two or three seats.
But as the count progressed through the night and into Wednesday afternoon, it appeared that the exit polls had missed the mark, with Netanyahu’s party and bloc ahead of Eisenkot’s.
In its update on Wednesday shortly after 9 p.m., the CEC said 89.8% of the total votes had been counted, representing the results of almost all ordinary ballot boxes.
Although the results are not definitive, they are not expected to change drastically.
In a statement, the CEC said the remaining ordinary polls would require additional monitoring, explaining the expected delay. In addition, the CEC said that around 430,000 and 480,000 so-called double-envelope votes had not yet been counted, with counting expected to begin early Thursday at 1 a.m. and end Thursday evening.
He noted that the estimated number of double envelopes was preliminary because officials were still receiving and processing ballots.
The ballots, cast mainly by soldiers, prisoners, diplomats stationed abroad and others unable to vote at their designated polling stations, are counted separately and had not yet been counted as of Wednesday evening, with authorities required to verify that each voter had not already voted elsewhere.
The full vote count was therefore to be made public Thursday afternoon. The final and official election results are expected to be released on November 4.
Given that each Knesset seat is worth around 40,000 votes, these mail-in votes could impact the final political landscape, and their results are expected to be added to the overall tally in the coming days.
In the meantime, however, the picture of a divided country was emerging, with no clear victory for either Netanyahu’s bloc or Eisenkot’s bloc, unless they were willing to work with each other or with the Arab Ra’am parties and the Joint List.
According to the 2:32 p.m. update, Netanyahu’s Likud was the largest party with 26 seats out of a possible 120, followed by Eizenkot’s Yashar with 21.
Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad Party and Yousef Jabareen’s Joint List each held 12 seats each, and the left-wing Democrats held eight.
The far-right Otzma Yehudit parties and the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism each held seven seats, as did Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu.
The Knesset’s 120 seats were complemented by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism, with six seats.
This left Yoaz Hendel’s Economic Reservists party below the electoral threshold of 3.25% with 2.63% of the vote, alongside Ofer Winter’s People of Israel, which received only 1.61% of the vote.
Charedi Public, a long-standing party that had offered an alternative vision to Israel’s ultra-Orthodox communities, was well below the threshold, with just 0.19 percent of the vote.
In practice, the distribution of seats between parties left the Netanyahu-led bloc of Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism with 53 seats, eight short of the 61-seat majority. The bloc has 68 seats in the current Knesset, a significant drop.
The Eisenkot bloc, made up of Yashar, B’Yachad, Democrats and Yisrael Beytenu, had a total of 48 seats, 13 less than the majority.
The Arab parties – the Joint List and Raam – held the remaining 19 seats between them, an all-time high and almost double their current 10 seats. This would be more than enough to tip the anti-Netanyahu bloc towards a comfortable majority, if all members of the Zionist bloc, except the Democrats, had not ruled out cooperating with Raam or the Joint List.
Gn world
