Oct. 27 (UPI) — Israelis were headed to the polls on Tuesday in the first national elections since the Oct. 7 attacks in 2023 and which many believe, even more so than in previous elections, is a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership of a country under fire.
Despite record turnout on track to be the highest since the early 1980s, voters are expected to return a hung Knesset, with neither Netanyahu’s Likud Party-led coalition or Gadi Eisenkot’s opposition Yashar Party-led “change bloc” forecast to reach the 61-seat-minimum required to form a government.
The Central Election Committee dismissed allegations by the main parties of voting irregularities across the country, saying there was no evidence of systematic tampering with ballot papers.
No overall majority will likely mean weeks or months of political horse-trading as the various blocs jockey to come up with a viable coalition that could govern, something in which Netanyahu has an unrivalled track record.
In the three years since the Hamas-led atrocities that occurred on his watch, Netanyahu has overseen the use of overwhelming military force in Gaza, killing at least 75,000 people, an expansion of settlements in the occupied West Bank and led Israel into regional conflicts in which tens of thousands of others have died in Lebanon and Iran, sparking a global energy crisis in the process.
Now, with Netanyahu, 76, currently battling three corruption cases against him, his personal as well as his political fortunes are on the line, depending largely on whether he can cobble together another power-sharing arrangement with the ultra-nationalist and Orthodox religious parties he has been in bed with since the last election in November 2022.
With as many as 500,000 young Israelis voting for the first time since coming of age, long lines formed at some polling stations but an incident in which a man was arrested for allegedly attempting to attack Democratic Party leader Yair Golan with a knife in Tel Aviv, demonstrated the deep fault lines in Israeli society.
Vowing he would not be deterred by violence and incitement, Golan blamed what he called “the poison machine operated by Netanyahu and his Qatari agents.”
“I call on everyone who cares about security and democracy to go out and vote now, so that we can ensure the country we love so dearly becomes a free and safe place once again,” said Golan who was assigned a Shin Bet security detail Monday, only 24 hours before the attack, after a long fight for protection.
In a recent survey of first-time Jewish voters, 75% identified themselves right or center-right on the political spectrum.
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