Whether Binyamin Netanyahu’s election victory was the result of a hard-right lurch in the last two days, or an inevitability shrouded by polls that understated his support all along, there is no doubt that Israel’s leader copperfastened his fourth re-election as the country voted. Just in case some voters had not understood the implicit narrative of his campaign “Bibi” spelled it out so that the most ignorant racist bigot would get the message: “Right-wing rule is in danger,” the prime minister warned in a last-minute video, “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.”
To which unambiguous articulation of his message – as if it needed any more – he added a promise that there would be no two-state solution, no independent Palestinian state, on his watch, and plenty more building of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. In other words, to hell with the international community's political support for a peace process road map leading to two states. To hell, a priori, with any idea of any resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s re-election as prime minister is of course not yet wholly assured. His Likud party’s success in winning 30 seats out of the Knesset’s 120 should make building a coalition of the right reasonably straightforward. But the bloc he led into the elections, his own Likud with two hard-right parties, which lost seats and ultra-Orthodox parties, lost the parliamentary majority they had and can only govern if they win support from the new Kulanu party (10 seats). It is led by Moshe Kahlon, a former Likud minister who fell out with Netanyahu, and who now assumes a critical kingmaker role.
President Reuven Rivlin now has responsibility for naming a candidate to try to form a government and although his own inclination is for a grand coalition that would include the opposition Zionist Union led by Isaac Herzog, neither the latter nor Netanyahu believe they share sufficient common ground to make that feasible. Kahlon appears likely to throw his hat in with Netanyahu after extracting after the usual few weeks of haggling a sufficient price - probably the finance ministry that he is known to covet.
If the election was essentially a referendum on Netanyahu’s nine years in office over three terms, it also revealed deep and bitter divisions in Israeli society, not least on economic lines, that are set to further deepen . And it also saw a new political dynamic in an important revival after years in the doldrums of the more pragmatic Zionism that shaped Israel in form of the Labor-led opposition. An alliance of four Arab parties, the Joint List, secured an impressive 13 seats and pushed up Arab turnout significantly.
Netanyahu may have secured a new mandate but the road ahead is likely to be more not less bumpy.