Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said on 5 November that he would name the candidate to form the country’s next government on Sunday 8 November, after consultations in which 67 of the Knesset’s 120 members recommended the opposition leader, Gadi Eisenkot.
The numbers
Forty-six lawmakers recommended the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, during the consultations on 5 and 6 November. The remaining seven did not recommend either candidate. The totals account for all 120 members of the Knesset.
Netanyahu’s Likud won 27 seats at the election on 27 October, the most of any single party, but his wider religious-nationalist coalition took 53. Eisenkot’s four-party alliance won 48. Two Arab-led parties won an unprecedented 19 seats between them, and both recommended Eisenkot. Neither bloc reached a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.
The 67 endorsements for Eisenkot correspond to his alliance’s 48 seats plus the 19 held by the two Arab-led parties. The 46 for Netanyahu leave seven members of his 53-seat bloc who named no candidate, consistent with United Torah Judaism’s position.
Herzog said that mutual vetoes between the blocs, and within them, made it difficult to say who had the best chance of forming a government. His announcement of the Sunday date came on 5 November, before the consultations had finished, and the count of endorsements was completed the following day.
The consultations are the point at which each party states whom it will support, and the totals the president gave are the record of those statements rather than a vote in the Knesset. The seat figures and the endorsement figures therefore measure the same 120 members in two different ways.
Eisenkot has ruled out forming a government with the Arab-led parties that recommended him. Their support therefore sits outside any government he would lead, and the two parties would not be partners in it.
The ultra-Orthodox abstention
United Torah Judaism declined to recommend any candidate, a setback for Netanyahu that turns on stalled legislation to exempt ultra-Orthodox men from military service. The abstention leaves the outgoing prime minister without the endorsement of a party that has sat in his coalition.
What happens next
The candidate named on Sunday will have 28 days to form a government, with a possible extension of 14 days. Netanyahu remains caretaker prime minister while the mandate is settled, and no date has been set for the swearing in of a government.
The Central Election Committee said on Wednesday that the integrity of the election had not been compromised. Netanyahu has disputed the outcome of the vote and denies wrongdoing in separate legal cases.
Whoever receives the mandate will face the same arithmetic that produced the consultation figures: 53 seats for the religious-nationalist bloc, 48 for Eisenkot’s alliance, 19 for the two Arab-led parties, and seven members outside those groups. A government assembled from those parts would rest on support from outside its own ranks.
The sequence of dates now runs from the election on 27 October, through the consultations on 5 and 6 November and the president’s statement on 5 November, to the announcement expected on Sunday.
For voters, the practical effect of Sunday’s announcement is that the caretaker arrangement continues until a coalition is sworn in, or until the mandate expires without one. The 28-day clock, and the 14-day extension available to the nominee, set the outer limit for that stage, and the Knesset’s 120 seats remain divided as the count of endorsements left them.
