Wednesday, March 18, 2015

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Netanyahu Says He'll Work Quickly to Form New Government - New York Times




Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel celebrated with supporters late Tuesday in Tel Aviv. Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel pledged on Wednesday to work quickly to form a new government after his clear-cut election victory as Isaac Herzog, the center-left opposition leader, conceded defeat.


“Our country’s everyday reality doesn’t give us the luxury for delay,” Mr. Netanyahu of the conservative Likud Party said in a statement.


“The citizens of Israel rightfully expect that we will act quickly and responsibly to establish a leadership that will work for them in areas of defense, the economy and society just as we promised in this campaign — and just like we will now set ourselves towards doing,” he added.



The new government will probably be made up mostly of right-wing and Orthodox parties. According to the statement, Mr. Netanyahu had already consulted overnight with the heads of the parties he expected to become coalition partners: Naftali Bennett of the pro-settlement Jewish Home; Moshe Kahlon of Kulanu, a new center-right party focused on economic issues; Avigdor Lieberman of the hard-line nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu; and the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism.


Such a coalition would give Mr. Netanyahu a majority of 67 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, or Parliament, with Likud commanding 30 of them, according to unofficial election results.


Mr. Herzog, the Labor Party leader, and his center-left alliance, the Zionist Union, appeared to be headed back into the opposition.


Speaking to reporters outside his Tel Aviv home on Wednesday morning, Mr. Herzog said he had called to congratulate Mr. Netanyahu. Given previous speculation about a possible grand unity government that would combine Likud and the Zionist Union, Mr. Herzog said it was “not the time to discuss governments and coalitions,” but he positioned his party as an “alternative” voice.


“It should be clear to the Israeli citizens that the challenges are the same challenges and the problems remain the same problems,” he said.


Other Zionist Union politicians were blunter about their party’s intentions. Shelly Yacimovich, a senior Labor and Zionist Union politician, said she had spoken with Mr. Herzog, who had clarified to her that the party would go into the opposition, according to Israel Radio.


Stav Shaffir, another of the party’s top politicians, wrote on her Facebook page, “We will serve the people from the opposition.”


Most Israelis went to bed with exit polls that inaccurately showed Likud and the Zionist Union in a close tie, with about 27 seats each, though Mr. Netanyahu appeared to have the advantage in forming a coalition.


On Wednesday morning, Israelis woke up to very different results once the majority of the votes had been counted, with Likud winning up to 30 seats and the Zionist Union 24.


For some, there was a feeling of status quo, since Mr. Netanyahu was re-elected to a third consecutive term, and a fourth in total, counting his first term in the 1990s.


“Anyone hoping to wake up today to the dawn of a new day will wake up instead this morning to another yesterday,” wrote Sima Kadmon, a political columnist, in an article published on Wednesday in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot.


“If yesterday morning there was still a feeling that there would be a shift in power and an atmosphere of change, overnight it became clear that nothing would change,” she wrote.


The decisive nature of Mr. Netanyahu’s comeback came as a surprise to most, since Likud had been trailing the Zionist Union by four seats in several polls released on Friday, the last day that polls were allowed to be published under Israel’s election law.


Avi Degani, an Israeli pollster, told reporters on Wednesday that many longtime Likud supporters who had tired of Mr. Netanyahu “got scared” when they saw the last pre-election polls suggesting the Zionist Union would come out on top, and simply “came home.”


Mr. Degani, president of the Geocartography Knowledge Group, said that over recent months, more than 60 percent of Israeli voters had indicated that they would like to see someone replacing Mr. Netanyahu as prime minister, but that only about a third thought that person should be Mr. Herzog.


Israel, Mr. Degani said, had a history of 10 percent to 15 percent of undecided voters making up their minds on the day of the election. He said he was sure that this was the pool from which Mr. Netanyahu had received his unexpected margin of victory.


After years of decline, there was a sense of deflation and disappointment on the left.


Zehava Galon, the leader of the leftist, secularist Meretz party, which scraped through the electoral threshold to win the minimum allocation of four seats in Parliament, according to the results on Wednesday, announced on her Facebook page that she was resigning and handing the party reins to Tamar Zandberg. Ms. Zandberg entered the Knesset on the Meretz slate after the last election in 2013, when Meretz won six seats.


This time around, the electoral threshold, or the minimum number of votes required for a party to enter Parliament, was raised to 3.25 percent from 2 percent of the overall vote, which translated into four seats.


Mr. Herzog presented the Zionist Union’s 24 seats as an achievement and pledged to continue to lead the bloc together with Tzipi Livni, the leader of a small, centrist party and co-founder of the new alliance. Mr. Herzog said the union would be “an alternative in each and every sphere.”


Merav Michaeli, another Zionist Union politician, wrote on Twitter: “As difficult as it is, it’s just another round. We have to raise our heads, recover and start preparing for the next round. This is our country. This is our society. We are here to work for both.”



Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting.











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