Spare Your People a Fourth Election, O Israel, and Form a Minority Government

Here we go again. The votes are fully counted, and it’s clear that Israel’s March 2 election, its third in less than a year, has once more failed to produce a path to a viable government.

For a moment, it seemed that this wouldn’t happen again. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party won a plurality of 36 seats in the 120-member Knesset, up from 32 in the previous round, while the opposition Blue and White party, led by Benny Gantz, remained at 33, the same as last time. Thus, on election night, Netanyahu and his partisans celebrated what they thought was an unexpected success.

The ebullience wore off the next morning. In the light of day, it emerged that Netanyahu and his coalition partners remained three seats short of the 61 needed to form a threadbare majority in the Knesset. So despite the change in the parties’ vote share, in functional terms the result has been no different from last September and the previous April. Israel’s electoral stalemate continues.