The right-wing bloc headed by former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have an absolute majority in the Knesset (Parliament) after the legislative elections held on Tuesday, according to the almost completed official count, which places Likud and its potential allies with about 65 seats.
The Parliament has 120 seats, so Netanyahu needed to guarantee himself at least 61 to confirm his return to power half a year later. The Electoral Commission grants Likud 31 legislators, while its main support, the ultra-right wing Religious Zionism, appears with 14, an unprecedented milestone in the history of the extreme right in Israel.
The leader of Religious Zionism, Itamar Ben Gvir, has promised that with him there will be a «completely right-wing» government, while waiting to see how his anti-Arab discourse fits into his expected role as minister. «I will work for everyone, even those who hate me,» he said Tuesday, according to ‘Times of Israel’.
The centrist Yesh Atid, the party of outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid, is in second place with 24 seats, but its rise is not enough to compensate for the decline of other partners, such as Meretz, which has been left out of the Knesset having narrowly failed to exceed 3.25 percent of the vote.
National Unity, the party led by the current Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, appears in the provisional count with 12 deputies, the same as those obtained by the ultra-Orthodox Shas. The parties with parliamentary representation are completed by the also ultra-Orthodox United Judaism for the Torah (eight seats), Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu (five), Raam (five), the Arab list Hadash-Taal (five) and Labor (four).
The final results are not expected until Thursday, although with the current forecasts on the table everything points to Netanyahu, with several pending court cases for corruption, returning to the office he held between 1996 and 1999 and between 2009 and 2021.
