In the very early hours of March 3, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his wildly cheering supporters about what appeared to be his biggest political victory ever. He had done it again. According to the exit polls aired at 10 p.m. local time on March 2, he was only a few tens of thousands of votes short of the 61 seats he needed for a Knesset majority. The feat that had appeared wholly impossible just weeks earlier was now happening in front of our eyes. “Tonight delivered a tremendous victory!” the jubilant prime minister declared. Netanyahu believed that as always, the real vote count would improve his Likud party’s showing even further and hand him the missing 61st seat. Even if the party fell short, at 60 seats, Netanyahu believed he could scrounge a defector from the ranks of the opposition that would allow him to form a government and lead it — while facing his criminal trial scheduled to start on March 17.

Less than two days later, Netanyahu was a political wreck. He found himself in the same situation as the late Shimon Peres, who went to sleep on May 29, 1996, as prime minister, confident in the election results projected by the exit polls that had him in the lead over his rival Netanyahu, only to wake up the next day as leader of the opposition. Netanyahu, in his first run for the premiership, had trounced him by a mere 30,000 votes.

Netanyahu has served as prime minister for 14 of the ensuing 24 years, breaking the cumulative term record set by the state’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Yet he is currently closer than ever to the end of his impressive career. The 60 Knesset seats projected by the exit polls dropped to 58 once all the votes were tallied. He had achieved a tremendous personal feat in bringing his Likud party from 32 to 36 Knesset seats, but failed in the real mission of culling a 61-seat bloc of support that would have enabled him to form his fifth government.

The disappointing vote count was only the beginning. The worst awaited Netanyahu on the morning of March 5. Avigdor Liberman, his once greatest loyalist turned demon in recent years, was now holding the political butcher’s knife over his neck with the announcement that his Yisrael Beitenu party would back newly proposed legislation barring an elected official under an aggravated criminal indictment from serving as prime minister. Should the opposition bill overcome the constitutional barriers to its passage, it would bring Netanyahu’s political career to an end in one fell swoop. Rather than an all-powerful prime minister, he would walk into the Jerusalem District Court as a run-of-the-mill defendant charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust. His first court date, March 17, follows the swearing-in of the 23rd Knesset the day before. If a scriptwriter had proposed such a scenario for a TV series, he would have been summarily dismissed.