For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, putting together a new governing coalition after Israel’s inconclusive election would be like assembling a jigsaw puzzle with ill-fitting pieces.
Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving leader, lost ground, with his Likud party failing to hold nearly a sixth of its seats in the Parliament, and his hawkish coalition seeing its share decline even more. But to the surprise of some political observers, Likud still emerged as the largest party with 27 seats.
If Mr. Netanyahu manages to get the green light from Israel’s president to try to form a government — not a given at this point — he will need 61 seats to retain power.
To do so, he must find a way to expand his coalition of far-right nationalist and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties, perhaps by luring at least eight defectors from an opposition bloc that has vowed to unseat him. Or he could try to create a national unity government with Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s former military chief who heads the center-right Yashar, the largest party in the anti-Netanyahu alliance.
To achieve either goal, Mr. Netanyahu, 77, would have to draw on decades of parliamentary savvy and political capital. He would also have to overcome a legacy of grievances he has left over a career of political skirmishes and, critics say, betrayals.
From Division to Unity?
The prime minister’s bloc now controls five more seats than the main opposition bloc, a politically diverse alliance of Jewish parties led by Mr. Eisenkot. But if Mr. Eisenkot were to partner with two predominantly Arab parties, who also oppose Mr. Netanyahu, the coalition would muster a comfortable majority of 67 seats to take power.
Some Jewish parties in the opposition have so far ruled that out, but Mr. Eisenkot could still be the one with the first chance of forming a government.
Mr. Eisenkot has in the past cooperated with Mr. Netanyahu, in the days after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, joining his emergency war cabinet to help steer the conflict in Gaza. Mr. Eisenkot’s political partner at the time, Benny Gantz, another former military chief and opponent of Mr. Netanyahu, joined the war cabinet as well.
They both left the government eight months later, frustrated with what they said was Mr. Netanyahu’s failure to design an exit strategy for the war and a diplomatic plan for Gaza’s future.
Mr. Netanyahu did not take any responsibility for Israel’s failure to prevent the Oct. 7 attack, instead blaming his generals. Mr. Eisenkot, who lost a son in the fighting in Gaza, declared Mr. Netanyahu unworthy of remaining in office and founded Yashar to unseat the prime minister.
In earlier years, Mr. Netanyahu had adopted a different strategy, trying to bring centrist parties into his coalitions.
“It was a mechanism that allowed him to shift the blame if he made moderate decisions that were unpopular with his constituency,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group.
Many Israelis would like to see a unity government. Forming one with Mr. Eisenkot’s party and possibly others in the opposition could require Mr. Netanyahu to abandon his most contentious policies, such as his government’s plan to overhaul the judiciary.
Mr. Netanyahu formed his hawkish government four years ago when mainstream parties refused to sit in a coalition with him after he was indicted in 2019 on charges of corruption, which he has denied.
Some critics say that Mr. Netanyahu has moved too far to the right to see a way back. “Netanyahu is a secular, liberal democrat. At least he was originally,” Ben Caspit, a political commentator and biographer of Mr. Netanyahu, wrote on Thursday in Maariv, a Hebrew newspaper. He noted that the prime minister had “displayed ideological flexibility and pragmatism countless times in the past.”
“Might he in his old age be capable of re-embracing the values he was raised on?” he asked. “I don’t know and I find it hard to believe that is possible.”
A Question of Trust
Previous efforts by Mr. Netanyahu to work with centrists have not ended well for them.
In 2014, Mr. Netanyahu fired his centrist finance and justice ministers, then engineered the dissolution of Parliament and brought about early elections.
In 2020, Mr. Gantz, a centrist, entered a unity government in a power-sharing arrangement with Mr. Netanyahu to help battle the coronavirus pandemic. That government collapsed seven months later, after Mr. Netanyahu violated agreements he had made with Mr. Gantz as a condition for him joining the government.
Mr. Gantz and his party have since lost so much support that he dropped out of this election race shortly before the vote.
“I don’t know if Netanyahu can convince anyone to join him now because it’s political suicide,” said Gadi Wolfsfeld, a professor of political communication at Reichman University in Herzliya.
Shaky Histories
If Mr. Netanyahu is looking to pick off defectors from Mr. Eisenkot’s bloc, two right-leaning parties, Together and Yisrael Beitenu, would both seem good ideological fits.
But their respective leaders, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman, are former associates turned bitter foes, and their relationships with the prime minister have deteriorated.
Mr. Bennett worked as chief of staff to Mr. Netanyahu two decades ago, when the Likud leader was in the opposition. Mr. Liberman helped shepherd Mr. Netanyahu to his first victory in 1996 and became the director-general of the prime minister’s office.
Mr. Liberman had an ugly breakup with Mr. Netanyahu over a personal slight in the late 1990s and left Likud to set up his own party.
Mr. Liberman subsequently joined Netanyahu-led coalitions, but he quit or was fired from five governments. Mr. Liberman brought down the government in 2018, complaining of a soft policy toward Hamas, then refused to cooperate with Mr. Netanyahu after a string of inconclusive elections.
Positioning himself as a secularist, Mr. Liberman has vowed not to join coalitions that include Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox allies, or what Mr. Liberman calls “messianists.”
The day before the election, Mr. Liberman called on the attorney general to investigate Mr. Netanyahu on suspicion of treason, accusing him of trying to set off a new military confrontation with Iran to delay the elections.
Mr. Bennett became prime minister in 2021 at the head of a short-lived, anti-Netanyahu government that included parties across the political spectrum, including a conservative Arab Islamic party.
Mr. Netanyahu publicly expressed his low opinion of Mr. Bennett in a 2023 autobiography, “Bibi: My Story.” “Though he postured as right-wing, I gradually understood that this was an empty pose. He craved fame and power,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote of Mr. Bennett.
If Mr. Netanyahu is unable to build a governing coalition, political analysts say he is banking on nobody else being able to do so either. And in the meantime, Mr. Netanyahu remains the head of a caretaker government and may prefer to wait for another election.
“That would be a relatively good outcome for Netanyahu,” Mr. Plesner said. The opposition might have a harder time mobilizing supporters a second time around, he said, adding, “another election might be an opportunity for Netanyahu to improve his showing.”
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