TEL AVIV (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 10th April, 2019) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has practically secured his 5th and 4th consecutive term as prime minister by leading his right-wing Likud party to a victory over retired generals, who teamed up to remove him from power and put an end to a 10-year dominance of the rightists in the country.
Despite the fact that the preliminary results do not promise a clear win to Netanyahu's party, Likud still can consider itself a winner. Likud has the new opposition centrist alliance Kahol Lavan neck and neck but enjoys the support of proven allies in the new Knesset. Therefore, it will be able to form another right-religious coalition that will be sustainable and strong due to the absence of irreconcilable ideological divides.
According to the Central Election Commission, the Likud party is winning the Israeli parliamentary election with 26.27 percent of the vote, while the opposition centrist alliance Kahol Lavan comes second with 25.96 percent of the vote after 4,074,276 ballots were counted.
According to media reports, both parties can count on 35 seats in the new legislature. Meanwhile, Netanyahu's future coalition might get 65 seats against projected 55 seats of the opposition coalition.
"It is a night of colossal victory," the prime minister told his supporters, whose long cheering prevented him from starting his victorious speech.
His wife Sarah was standing next to him at the podium, smiling and keeping her fingers in the shape of a heart. Netanyahu revealed that he had already launched coalition talks with the right-wing parties and their "natural allies" � ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties � and received assurances from almost all of them that he would be recommended for leading the formation of the new government.
After the official results of the vote are released, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will hold consultations with the parties that overcame the electoral threshold in order to designate a lawmaker with the best chance of being supported by the parliamentary majority. The designated lawmaker will have up to 42 days to form a coalition and a cabinet.
Benny Gantz, the head of the Kahol Lavan political alliance, has also claimed victory and announced his plans to form the cabinet, despite the fact that the official results of the Tuesday parliamentary elections are yet to be announced. Gantz justified his bid for the prime minister's chair by exit poll results that promised the Kahol Lavan a victory over Likud. Speaking to his supporters, Gantz talked about the desire to create the widest possible government of national unity.
Netanyahu came to the parliamentary elections with an impressive record of achievements, such as an unprecedented rapprochement with the United States, which regularly challenges the common international practice to protect its main ally in the Middle East; a successful military campaign against Iran's presence in Syria; the thaw in relations with the Arab world, which was achieved despite the Palestinian problem.
The prime minister's failures are three criminal cases that in the coming months could turn into corruption charges against him, threatening him with an early resignation.
The Kahol Lavan alliance, which means blue and white in Hebrew and represents the colors of the Israeli flag, was created for April's parliamentary elections by three former chiefs of general staff: Benny Gantz, Moshe Yaalon, who also used to serve as defense minister, and Gabi Ashkenazi.
They were joined by former Finance Minister Yair Lapid and his secular middle class Yesh Atid party. If the opposition manages to win Tuesday's vote and Gantz receives the prime minister's seat, Lapid is thought to replace Gantz as the head of the cabinet in two and a half years.
During the election campaign, the retired generals attempted to convince voters that they were capable of pursuing Netanyahu's popular foreign and defense policies, while Lapid's involvement in the campaign should have promised voters greater liberalism in the country's internal affairs, including in terms of minority rights and relations between the state, religion and society.
The Likud's election campaign went under the slogan "Netanyahu is a different league," constantly reminding the Israelis of the prime minister's achievements and being supported by his extraordinary foreign policy activity. On the eve of the election, Netanyahu flew to Washington, where US President Donald Trump in his presence signed a decree recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, contested by Syria.
The initiative gave the competitors an opportunity to talk about the US leader's interference in the electoral process and providing backstopping to the incumbent prime minister. Trump himself, who had previously posted Netanyahu's election poster on Twitter, claimed that he did not even know about the elections.
In Warsaw, the Israeli prime minister participated in the Middle East Conference along with representatives of Arab countries that do not have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state. Before the election, Netanyahu also visited Moscow twice, including the last week's visit, to thank Russian soldiers for discovering remains of a missing Israeli soldier in Syria. The soldier had been considered missing for 37 years.
Netanyahu's legal problems became practically the only trump card for his opponents. They have argued that the prime minister would be so busy proving his own innocence in the coming months that he will not have time to lead the country.
