When the polls closed on April 9 in Israel, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz was quick to proclaim victory. Not so fast, however. When the pollster Camil Fuchs announced the results of his exit poll on Channel 13 News, Israelis grasped the true reality. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had won again. Fuchs turned Gantz's “victory speech” into the joke of the elections. Similarly, a poll Fuchs conducted for Channel 13 on May 30, the day after Israel’s shortest-ever Knesset voted to dissolve itself, does not signal a clear victory for Gantz and the center-left bloc in September elections for the 22nd Knesset.
Speaking with Al-Monitor, the veteran statistician said an analysis of all eligible votes in the April elections, including those cast for the New Right and Zehut, both of which failed to cross the electoral threshold, points to a significant advantage for the right-wing and ultra-Orthodox bloc. If the New Right and Zehut had received enough votes to get their candidates into the Knesset, the bloc would have held 68.5 of the 120 Knesset seats (instead of the 65 seats it received).
The New Right and Zehut, along with the center-right Gesher, are likely to ally with larger parties for the Sept. 17 elections instead of running independently. Given this, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to receive his sixth mandate to form a government. To deprive Netanyahu of such a victory, Avigdor Liberman, his nemesis and chair of Yisrael Beitenu, which garnered five Knesset seats in April, will need at least two or three additional seats and with them join Netanyahu’s rivals to tilt the balance against the right and ultra-Orthodox.
The center-left bloc also failed to fulfill its electoral potential on April 9. The two Arab factions together received three seats less (10 in all) than the alliance of four Arab parties, the Joint List, received in the 2015 elections for the 20th Knesset. According to Fuchs, his studies confirm assessments that the breakup of the Joint List earlier this year resulted in significantly lower voter turnout in Arab areas.
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