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Exit Polls Show Israeli Right in Tight Victory as Centrists Gain Exit Polls Show Israeli Right in Tight Victory as Centrists Gain
(about 5 hours later)
TEL AVIV — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu performed far worse than expected in Israel’s national elections on Tuesday, according to exit polls, and while he remained likely to serve a third term, a surprise surge by a new centrist party indicated that he would be under pressure to form a more moderate governing coalition. TEL AVIV — A weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged Wednesday from Israel’s national election likely to serve a third term, according to preliminary results and political analysts after voters on Tuesday gave a surprising second place to a new centrist party founded by a television celebrity who emphasized kitchen-table issues like class size and apartment prices.
As polls closed at 10 p.m., Israeli news channels reported that Mr. Netanyahu’s rightist Likud-Beiteinu list would win 30 or 31 of Parliament’s 120 seats, and the new centrist party, There is a Future, would take 18, followed by left-leaning Labor, with 17. More important, the polls showed a significant tightening between the bloc of right-wing and religious parties, with a razor-thin majority of 61, and 59 for the center-left factions. For Mr. Netanyahu, who entered the race an overwhelming favorite with no obvious challenger, the outcome was a humbling rebuke as his ticket lost seats in the new Parliament. Overall, the prime minister’s conservative team came in first, but it was the center, led by the political novice Yair Lapid, 49, that emerged newly invigorated, suggesting that at the very least Israel’s rightward tilt may be stalled.
“Israelis are asking for a moderate coalition,” said Marcus Sheff, executive director of The Israel Project, an advocacy group. “Israel’s middle class wasn’t asleep as people assumed. The embers of the social protest are still strong.” Mr. Lapid, a telegenic celebrity whose father made a splash with his own short-lived centrist party a decade ago, based his campaign on issues that resonated with the middle class, including the need to integrate the ultra-Orthodox into the army and the work force.
The exit polls, which are preliminary, suggested that Mr. Netanyahu’s challengers had a far stronger showing than the prime minister and his aides had anticipated. Two hours before the polls closed, Mr. Netanyahu made an urgent appeal for support from Israelis who had not yet voted. Perhaps as important, he also avoided antagonizing the right, having not emphasized traditional issues of the left, like the peace process. Like a large majority of the Israeli public, he supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but is skeptical of the Palestinian leadership’s willingness to negotiate seriously; he has called for a return to peace talks but has not made it a priority.
“The Likud leadership is in danger,” Mr. Netanyahu wrote on his Facebook page around 8 p.m. “I ask you to leave everything and go out now to vote,” he added. “This is very important to guarantee the future of the state of Israel.” On Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu implored his supporters to turn out, reading signs that voters were not embracing his message of security and his party’s conservative agenda. The day ended with Mr. Netanyahu reaching out again —this time to Mr. Lapid, offering to work with Israel’s newest kingmaker as part of the “broadest coalition possible.”
While Mr. Netanyahu’s joint campaign list with the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu faction was still expected to win more of Parliament’s seats than the next-largest party, making him the likeliest candidate to lead the next government, a relatively weak showing and a surge for centrist and left-leaning parties could force him to moderate his policies and leave him with a fragile coalition of competing interests. Israel’s political hierarchy is only partly determined during an election. The next stage, when factions try to build a majority coalition, decides who will rule, how they will rule and for how long. While Mr. Lapid has signaled a willingness to work with Mr. Netanyahu, the ultimate coalition may bring together parties with such different ideologies and agendas that the result is neither a shift to the right nor the left, but paralysis.
Shortly after the polls closed, Mr. Netanyahu announced in another posting on his Facebook page that “According to the poll results it is clear that the citizens of Israel have decided that they want me to continue in my position as prime minister, and for me to form as broad a coalition as possible.” Still, for the center, it was a time of celebration.
The posting also said "The apparent results are a wonderful chance for many changes that will benefit all of Israel’s citizens. The elections are now behind us, and many complex challenges are before us.” “The citizens of Israel today said no to politics of fear and hatred,” Mr. Lapid told an upscale crowd of supporters that had welcomed him with drums, dancing and popping Champagne corks. “They said no to the possibility that we might splinter off into sectors, and groups and tribes and narrow interest groups. They said no to extremists, and they said no to antidemocratic behavior.”
The Central Election Commission reported that 63 percent of Israel’s eligible voters had cast ballots by 8 p.m., nearly as many as the 65 percent who voted over all in 2009. The turnout was on pace to exceed that in the four previous elections, experts said, though not to reach the 78 percent who voted in 1999. With three-quarters of the votes counted by 3 a.m. Wednesday, Israel Radio reported that Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud-Beiteinu ticket was poised to take 31 of Parliament’s 120 seats, with Mr. Lapid’s party, There Is a Future, coming in second with 19, far more than polls had predicted. The right wing and religious parties that make up Mr. Netanyahu’s current coalition garnered a thin majority of perhaps 62 seats, pushing him to try to join with Mr. Lapid instead and possibly embrace other center and left-leaning groups. Labor took 15 seats in early returns and Jewish Home, a new religious-nationalist party, 11
Noting that there had been an unusually large portion of undecided voters in polls taken in the campaign’s final days, analysts were predicting a surprisingly strong showing for There is a Future and perhaps for the left-leaning Labor. The prime minister called Mr. Lapid shortly after the polls closed at 10 p.m. Tuesday and, according to Israeli television reports, told him that they had great things to do together for the country. In his speech to a rowdy crowd of supporters here Wednesday morning, he said, “I see many partners.”
Erel Margalit, a venture capitalist who as No. 10 on Labor’s list was likely to land in Parliament, described the large turnout as a “protest vote” against the prime minister’s policies on dealing with the Palestinians and the economy, and a follow-up to the social protests that brought 500,000 people to the streets of Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011. Mr. Lapid said he was open to working with Mr. Netanyahu, saying the only way to face Israel’s challenges was “together.” But he added: “What is good for Israel is not in the possession of the right, and nor is it in the possession of the left. It lies in the possibility of creating here a real and decent center.”
“It’s a clear demonstration of how many Israelis feel like something needs to be done and something needs to change,” Mr. Margalit, a first-time candidate, told reporters at an election-night party. “It was not a fringe phenomenon, it was a mainstream phenomenon. It is moving from the streets into the political arena.” The results were a blow to the prime minister, whose aggressive push to expand Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank has led to international condemnation and strained relations with Washington. The support for Mr. Lapid and the left-leaning Labor Party showed voters responded strongly to an emphasis on domestic, socioeconomic issues that brought 500,000 people to the streets of Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011.
Polls in recent weeks have consistently predicted a victory for Mr. Netanyahu’s ticket. But the polls have also shown the joint ticket declining in strength, from the 42 seats it holds in the current Parliament to perhaps 32 or 35, and losing support to the Jewish Home, a party further to the right that has been revitalized and energized under the leadership of Naftali Bennett, a charismatic first-time candidate. “Israelis are asking for a moderate coalition,” said Marcus Sheff, executive director of the Israel Project, an advocacy group that conducts research on public opinion. “Israel’s middle class wasn’t asleep as people assumed. The embers of the social protest are still strong.”
The Likud also apparently was losing votes to There is a Future, led by the former journalist Yair Lapid, according to Israeli news media. Erel Margalit, a venture capitalist and first-time candidate who was elected to Parliament as No. 10 on Labor’s list, described the high turnout as a “protest vote” and “a clear demonstration of how many Israelis feel like something needs to be done and something needs to change.”
Mr. Netanyahu, after casting his vote, went to the Western Wall, a Jewish holy site in the Old City of Jerusalem, and said, “I pray today for the future of Israel, for the sake of our people, I believe in this and I am certain that Israel’s citizens will do all within their power to give strength to the people of Israel in its land and country.” “It was not a fringe phenomenon — it was a mainstream phenomenon,” he said of the 2011 movement. “It is moving from the streets into the political arena.”
Outside a polling place in south Jerusalem, Lisa Barkan, 51, who runs a nongovernmental organization that helps new immigrants, said she had voted for Likud “because I believe in a strong economy.” After a lackluster campaign in which the center-left failed to field a credible alternative to Mr. Netanyahu and much attention focused on the rise of Jewish Home, which wants Israel to annex large swaths of the West Bank, the results shocked many analysts and even candidates. Turnout was nearly 67 percent, higher than the 65 percent in 2009 or the 63 percent in 2003.
“That’s what keeps the state strong, gives people jobs, makes people happy to get up in the morning, because they know they can feed their families, and allows us to absorb immigrants,” she said. “Peace will come when it is ready, no matter what party is in power.” Meretz, the left-wing pro-peace party, was to double its three Parliament seats, with six, according to early returns. But Kadima, which earned the most seats — 28 — in the last election, had shrunk to two seats. The party collapsed last year after briefly entering Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition only to fail in its promise to end draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students.
But hours before the ballots opened, some longtime Likud supporters expressed their frustration with the departing Netanyahu government, saying it had not offered a clear path forward for Israel. One said he would still be voting for Likud in the same way that he remained loyal to his soccer team. Another said he would not support Likud this time but was still undecided about whom to vote for instead. Mr. Netanyahu, 63, is already Israel’s second-longest serving prime minister, after the state’s founding leader, David Ben-Gurion, having served from 1996 to 1999 and then again since 2009.
The parties of the divided center and left failed to forge a united bloc that might have presented a realistic challenge to the current leadership. The Labor Party, projected to win fewer than 20 seats, has said that if it does not win enough support to lead the new government, it will sit in the opposition. Analysts said he had virtually ensured his victory as the campaign had begun by uniting his Likud Party with the nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, whose leader, Avigdor Lieberman, resigned as foreign minister last month after being indicted on a charge of fraud. But it was mostly downhill from there: the joint list fell far short of the 42 seats the two parties currently hold in Parliament, which experts attributed both to supporters’ confidence in Mr. Netanyahu returning to the premiership — leaving them feeling freer to cast ballots elsewhere — and a series of tactical errors.
As usual in Israel, where more than 30 parties were competing in a system based on nationwide proportional representation, no single party was expected to win enough seats for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. If the polls were anywhere close to accurate, a weakened Mr. Netanyahu was likely to face the choice of forming a narrow rightist and religious coalition or a broader one including one or more centrist parties — an option that could subject the prime minister to pressures from either side and lead to instability or paralysis. “While in the past he was given poor cards and played them well, this time he had the best cards and played them badly,” Ari Shavit, a columnist for the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, said on Israel’s Channel One on Tuesday night. “This was a lesson in how not to run a campaign.”
“The sense is that there may be another election a year and a half from now,” said another Abu Tor voter, Ruthi Ginsburg, 78. The last two days of the campaign were marked by infighting and finger-pointing in Mr. Netanyahu’s camp over who was to blame for the slide. At 8 p.m. Tuesday, the prime minister sent out a panicky message via Facebook: “The Likud government is in danger, go vote for us for the sake of the country’s future.”
Critical issues on Israel’s agenda, like the peace process with the Palestinians and the question of how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, figured superficially, if at all, in an election campaign that focused mostly on domestic issues, with parties on both the left and right pledging to bring down housing prices, a primary demand of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who joined the social justice street protests in 2011. Several commentators saw Tuesday’s vote as an “interim” election, predicting that the new coalition, whatever its makeup, would not be able to withstand the pressing challenges ahead, including a $10 billion budget deficit and the question of whether to launch a military strike against the Iranian nuclear program.
“The campaign did not require people to choose between alternative ideas on important issues. It was all about images and personalities,” said Dan Caspi, a professor in the department of communications at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This election, Mr. Caspi said, would leave “everything open,” with the policies of the future government dependent on how the coalition shapes up and on the involvement of international powers. "This is a government that will not be able to make decisions on anything — on the peace process, on equal sharing of the burden or on budgetary matters," Emmanuel Rosen, a prominent television analyst, said early Wednesday on Channel 10. "The next elections are already on the horizon.
Many Israelis said that the liveliest campaign was run by the Central Elections Committee, which led a drive to get apathetic and wavering citizens out to vote, warning that anybody who did not vote should not be allowed to complain for the next four years.
Though elections are meant to take place every four years, unstable coalitions resulted in five general elections between 1992 and 2009, plus an additional direct ballot for the post of prime minister. Experts said that voter fatigue partly explained the steady drop in participation over the years, from nearly 80 percent in the 1990s to less than 65 percent in 2009.
The president of Israel, Shimon Peres, urged citizens to exercise their right to vote.
“Today the state is asking citizens to vote for a free, beautiful, democratic country,” Mr. Peres said after casting his own ballot on Tuesday, a public holiday. “You can hesitate over who to vote for, but don’t hesitate to vote.”
Nahum Barnea, one of the country’s most prominent political columnists, wrote in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot on Tuesday: “One of the reasons for the despondent atmosphere is anxiety about the future. Young people are anxious because of the high price of apartments and the loss of job security; older people are anxious about Israel’s isolation in the world and an economic crisis that might wipe out their savings. Everyone is anxious about war.”
The pre-election campaigns “failed to provide a calming answer to any of those anxieties,” he added. “At the end of the day, when the results are in, there will still be no answer. The sense will be that the story is over. In fact, it will only be beginning.”

Jodi Rudoren reported from Tel Aviv, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem.

Jodi Rudoren reported from Tel Aviv, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Myra Noveck contributed reporting from Jerusalem.