Israelis head to the polls on Tuesday in the country’s fourth national election in just two years, caused by the collapse of the most recent coalition government  in December. 

As the country that often prides itself on being “the only democracy in the Middle East”, many politically exhausted Israelis and observers of Israeli politics are asking themselves the same question – how much democracy is too much democracy?

To understand how Israel got here, we have to travel back to March 2nd 2020, the date of its most recent election. Back to a time when voters quarantining due to the Covid-19 pandemic felt like a gimmick, and a time when Benny Gantz, the former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), leading a new party, Blue & White (Kahol Lavan in Hebrew), positioned himself as the main opposition to incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. 

Blue & White had been formed a year earlier, in February 2019, in anticipation of the election in April  – the first in this current cycle of uncertainty – through an alliance between the Israel Resilience Party, Yesh Atid and Telem. There are 39 parties registered to contest the Knesset’s 120 seats, usually operating as pre-arranged factions who have vote-sharing agreements in the proportional representation “list” system, where the whole country is a single constituency.

Gantz’s new party sold itself as a big-tent, centrist alternative to Netanyahu’s increasingly right-wing Likud party. In the April election, Blue & White won 35 seats – the same as Likud – before conceding defeat.  But when Likud failed to form a governing coalition between Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties and Avigdor Lieberman’s secular Yisrael Beiteinu party, the September 2019 election was triggered. 

Netanyahu’s inability to form a governing coalition was the first time in Israeli electoral history  that a candidate for Prime Minister had failed to do so. It would not be the last. 

The September 2019 election once again produced no outright winner, with Likud performing worse than expected with 31 seats to Blue & White’s 33. Lieberman again became a ‘kingmaker’, but when he and Netanyahu proved unable to form a government, the mandate passed to Gantz, who had 28 days to put together a coalition.

He could not, and for the first time the Knesset voted to dissolve itself before a government had been formed. 

By March 2020, the feeling was that the third time must be the charm – surely this time the voters can decide definitively who should lead the country? 

Although the turnout for the March 2020 election was higher than both the April and September 2019 contests, once again the results were not definitive, with Netanyahu gaining just four seats and Blue & White retaining its 33 seats. Israel was left in another political stalemate which was only resolved when both Likud and Blue & White agreed to form an‘emergency national government’. 

The premiership was to be rotated between Netanyahu and Gantz, with Netanyahu initially taking the reins before Gantz became the designated Prime Minister in November 2020. But he hardly had a chance to settle into the top job before elections were called in December, the result of long-standing disagreements between the rivals. 

All of this, meanwhile, was taking place against the backdrop of Netanyahu’s trial on corruption charges, Israel’s world-leading vaccination drive and the signing of the Abraham Accords in the summer of 2020. 

So, what’s changed in the last 12 months? For Israeli society, and by extension for Netanyahu, quite a lot.

Israel and Covid-19

Israel has both been praised and harshly criticised for its response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

At the beginning of the crisis Netanyahu took what were largely considered to be swift and decisive actions, calling for all international travellers to self-quarantine for two weeks – a policy now widely adopted by other countries. In May, Netanyahu’s Covid Cabinet was certain it had defeated the virus, and encouraged Israelis to “return to normalcy” and “first of all have fun”. 

By September, however, Israel would have the highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the world. 

As a result of the pre-Covid political stalemate and the unemployment rate in the country reaching  21-24% during the initial lockdowns, people took to the streets during the summer to call for Netanyahu’s resignation, literally setting up camp outside the Prime Minister’s  residence on Balfour Street, Jerusalem.

These protests were the culmination of 18 months of anti-Netanyahu demonstrations carried out by ex-IDF generals in response to the Prime Minister’s indictment for corruption. But the 2020 protests also incorporated a broad coalition of Israeli society that had not been seen since social justice protests almost ten years earlier. 

The large protests were ended by another series of Covid lockdowns confining the majority of Israelis to just 1km from their homes,  prompting smaller demonstrations across the country.According to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, over half of the Israeli public believed that this second lockdown was motivated by politics rather than public health. 

The Israeli Left

Despite the persistence of these anti-Netanyahu protests, their demographics – majority middle-class and Ashkenazi – reflect the characteristics of Israel’s dying Left camp.

The country’s Labor party is historically identified as the political party that “built Israel”, having led the country since its founding in 1948 almost consistently until the late 1990s, when the rise of the Likud party signaled a general shift of Israeli politics to the right with the second intifada.

In the April 2019 election the centre-left parties (Blue & White, Labor, Meretz and Kulanu) had won 49 seats in the Knesset, but by the time of a December 2020 opinion poll, its popularity had fallen significantly – showing the bloc likely to win only 26 seats at the next election contest. 

The person – notably, the woman – tasked with saving the Israeli centre-left is Merav Michaeli, one of only three Labor MKs in the latest Knesset.  She became Labor party leader in January 2021, after its former leader Amir Peretz joined Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition. 

Michaeli a former journalist, is known within the Israeli political scene for being a strong feminist who infamously gave a TED Talk in 2012 calling to ‘Cancel Marriage’. Her public image reflects these feminist values, as she is known for exclusively wearing black and only using the feminine form of the highly gendered Hebrew language. 

Recent polls have predicted that Labor is likely to gain two seats in the upcoming elections, with Michaeli signaling that her party would likely recommend Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid over Netanyahu as the next Prime Minister. 

The Ultra-Orthodox Community 

The protests on Balfour Street were not the only example of Netanyahu’s political past coming back to haunt him last year. 

Israel’s ultra-orthodox community is key to Netanyahu’s plans to stay in power, but the community’s defiance of Covid-19 restrictions – and high levels of Covid-19 cases – have exacerbated existing tensions with the country’s secular population.  According to the New York Times, the ultra-orthodox community represents 12.6% of the total population, but 28% of all Covid-19 infections.

Until May 2020 Netanyahu’s government had an ultra-orthodox Health Minister, Yaakov Litzman, from the United Torah Judaism alliance in the Knesset. Throughout the pandemic Litzman had been criticized for his “unprofessional” handling of the crisis, which included being spotted flaunting lockdown restrictions to pray at someone else’s home and declaring that the Messiah would come by Passover to save Israel.

He was subsequently appointed Minister of Housing and Construction. However, issues from Netanyahu’s alliance with the ultra-orthodox community did not begin and end with Litzman. 

While the majority of schools in Israel have had to deal with the global issue of online learning, ultra-orthodox children returned to class early, often without masks, with parents following the declaration of prominent Rabbis rather than the government. Despite widespread societal outrage, Netanyahu’s political alliance with this community resulted in almost no retaliation from Israeli authorities. 

Netanyahu’s new rivals

Netanyahu’s alliance with the ultra-orthodox and willingness to turn a blind eye to their defiance of Covid-19 restrictions highlights the vulnerability of Netanyahu’s position as ‘King’ of the Israeli political landscape. 

To add to the recent electoral ‘firsts’, Netanyahu is the first Israeli Prime Minister to be indicted on criminal charges, with his trial for corruption having resumed in February 2021. Remaining Prime Minister is one of the sure-fire ways that Netanyahu can avoid jail time if he is convicted, giving his campaign to stay in office a personal edge.  The evidence stage of the trial has been delayed until after the election, and is set to begin on April 5.

His long-time ally within Likud, Gideon Saar, now leads a new party called New Hope (Tikva Hadasha in Hebrew). In January 2021 this party entered an electoral agreement with the Yamina (meaning ‘rightwards’) party, headed by another former-Netanyahu protégé,  Naftali Bennet. 

In response, Yesh Atid’s leader Lapid and Yisrael Beiteinu’s Lieberman signed a similar agreement in an effort to prevent Netanyahu’s Likud from gaining the seats needed to form a government. 

Netanyahu and the Arab Israeli population

Perhaps as a result of Netanyahu’s exclusion by fellow politicians and his reliance on an unpopular sector of Israeli society, Likud has turned its campaigning efforts to a community it previously alienated – the Arab population.

Despite previously stating that Arab Israelis were voting “in droves” in order to scare his religious and nationalist base into voting, and calling the Arab Joint List alliance of parties “supporters of terrorists” during elections in the last six years, Netanyahu has changed his tune. 

In February, Likud appointed its first-ever Arab candidate, Nael Zoabi, while Netanyahu has taken his in-person  campaigning efforts to the Arab city of Nazareth. 

Part of Netanyahu’s newfound appeal to the Israeli Arab community can be attributed to the Joint List’s recent split. Founded in 2015, the Joint List combined the four major Arab parties in Israel – Balad, Hadash, Ta’al and the United Arab List. 

After the March 2020 election the coalition increased their number of seats in the Knesset from 13 to 15. But faults within this coalition recently came to an impasse, as the United Arab List’s leader Mansour Abbas officially announced that his party was leaving the Joint List. The other three parties remain in the coalition and plan on continuing their joint campaign for the upcoming election, but the schism has led to a split in the Arab Israeli vote that Netanyahu hopes to take advantage of.

Israel and the US

As part of his attempts to rally the Arab vote, Netanyahu has been promoting the success of the historic Abraham Accords, a series of normalization agreements signed between Israel, the Gulf states, and the US in August 2020. 

As part of these Accords, Netanyahu has promised to temporarily postpone plans to annex 30% of the West Bank. But with a new administration in the US, Netanyahu has not been able to use his friendship with the American presidency as a campaign platform as he has in previous years. 

In contrast to spending the majority of the previous US administration’s term courting both the Trump and Kushner families, Netanyahu was kept waiting for a post-inauguration phone call from Joe Biden for four weeks – a story that became a source of anxiety for Israeli political pundits, and a signal from Washington that the US president was no longer at Netanyahu’s beck and call. 

Despite being the first leader in the Middle East that President Biden eventually called, it is expected that the two leaders’ almost 40-year acquaintance will not prevent the US administration’s plans to revisit the Iran nuclear deal – which Trump withdrew from – and criticism of Israeli settlement expansion, which was endorsed by Trump’s Ambassador to Israel. 

Vaccination success

Netanyahu is also heavily relying on Israel’s successful Covid-19 vaccination programme to keep his job. 

Israel has administered the fastest Covid-19 distribution of vaccinations in the world, with figures from this week  showing that 55.6% of the population had received the vaccine. As a result, the country has widely reopened, including bars, restaurants, gyms, schools, event halls, sporting events and hotels. Netanyahu has largely taken personal credit, telling voters while campaigning that “I have brought the vaccines”. 

While it is true that Netanyahu brokered the deal with Pfizer that ensured that the Israeli population would be vaccinated in exchange for access to the country’s database of information from its national health-care system, it hasn’t been quite enough to save him from the brink. 

The decision to introduce a ‘Green Badge’ system that allows only fully-vaccinated citizens to engage in leisure activities; the closure of Ben Gurion Airport that left thousands of Israelis stranded abroad; and international pressure for Israel to take responsibility for vaccinating Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza have all created further problems for Netanyahu’s re-election bid.

The end of ‘King Bibi’?

Weeks before election day, the centrist Yesh Atid party has seen a boost in the polls, leading some to ask whether former journalist and veteran politician Lapid has now taken over from Benny Gantz as the man who can defeat Netanyahu to become the new Prime Minister of Israel. 

The splintering of former Bibi allies into various shades of right-wing may split the traditional Likud vote, but the positioning of Lapid as the most likely anti-Netanyahu opponent also has the potential to bolster Netanyahu’s base – populist leaders tend to adopt the position of a victim when they are directly opposed. 

As Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, author of the book Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated in his Haaretz podcast Election Overdose, historically Netanyahu tends to ramp up his campaigning efforts the week before the election, having previously gone to the beach on election day to personally get voters out of the water and into the polling booths. 

However, taking the results of the last three Israeli elections into account, along with the lack of coalition partners who would be willing to join Likud at the negotiating table in order to achieve the magic number of 61 seats needed to form a government, Netanyahu’s position looks a lot less stable than it has at previous contests. 

So, heading into the final weekend of campaigning, several outcomes therefore appear possible – another stalemate; another outright success for Netanyahu’s Likud; a centrist anti-Netanyahu coalition government; or – to the likely exhaustion of voters and observers of Israeli politics alike – a fifth election cycle.