Middle East and US expert, political scientist Alexander Kargin:
I believe that neither the “pro-Netanyahu” bloc of parties — consisting of Likud, Dati Zionut, Otzma Israel, Shas and Yahadut HaTorah — nor the “anti-Netanyahu” bloc consisting of the parties Yesh Atid, Beyahad, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Democrats, will take a majority of seats in the Israeli parliament. Thus, neither group will be able to form a government on its own.
At the same time, much will depend on the possible entry into parliament of small parties like Amha Israel, which could join one of the sides.
A separate topic is the Arab parties, which will certainly enter the Knesset and gain enough votes. In theory the opposition has already won — they could enter into an alliance with the aforementioned parties and thereby secure a guaranteed result. However, for most Israeli politicians this would be a most severe political blow due to the often anti-Israeli position of the leaders of the Arab parties and the rejection of such an alliance within Israel. Therefore, for now everyone denies such a possibility, but I would not completely discount it.
A separate problem for the opposition is the absence of a single candidate for prime minister. As of today, the “anti-Bibi” bloc has as many as five leaders and each has their own ambitions. These are Bennett, Lieberman, Eisenkot, Lapid and Golan. And apart from a negative attitude toward Netanyahu, practically nothing unites them. The first two are right-wing, the second two are centrists, and the last one is extremely left-wing.
My forecast is that, after long and futile negotiations following the current elections, Israel will go to new elections in six months. All this time Netanyahu will remain acting prime minister, so this scenario suits him perfectly well.
At the same time, one cannot rule out the option of a grand “national unity” government with the unification of part of the opposition and pro-government parties. In this case, the head of government will certainly not be Netanyahu (the opposition will not agree to anything else), but he could nevertheless end up in it as a minister.
We will watch how events develop.
