Just past 10 p.m. Israel time, noon here…
Evidently three different media exit polls suggest Kadima has won a plurality, 30 or 29 seats to Likud’s 27 or so. YB at about 15 and Labor at 13 or 14. All very preliminary, of course. And just exit polls.
Even if confirmed it would not guarantee that Livni would be PM, as the right bloc is far ahead of the center-left.
(I am watching a live feed on Al Jazeera English over Livestation–I can’t get any of this service’s supposedly available Israeli channels–but it’s live from Jerusalem.)
Update: And now there is a Haaretz story up with various exit-poll numbers.
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The Knesset has live election results here (also available here), but in Hebrew only – no results in English this year, at least as far as I can tell.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 10 February 2009 @ 20:04
Thanks for that link, Manuel. It looks like the Haaretz page I linked above is keeping track with the Knesset page (albeit rounded, rather than with the tenths included). And it’s in English.
(Scroll down on the page, below the display of the seats estimated from the various exit polls.)
Seed planted by MSS — 10 February 2009 @ 20:31
Barak is saying now that he will “serve the country from the opposition.”
Seed planted by MSS — 10 February 2009 @ 20:37
And then Lieberman came on to claim credit for having set the agenda of the campaign. (He has a point.) He said the “nationalist bloc” had a clear majority and crowed that his party is the only major one with its HQ in Jerusalem (is that right?).
Seed planted by MSS — 10 February 2009 @ 21:33
I have to hand it to Word Press’s spam filter: it just weeded out this blog’s first-ever antisemitic comment. Even though it had just one link–multiple links can cause even valuable legitimate comments to trigger the filter.
Unfortunately, I still had to see the item, before confirming that it was indeed worthy of being hauled off to the garbage dump. Not the compost pile: that vile stuff is not even useful as fertilizer.
Seed planted by MSS — 10 February 2009 @ 23:34
Hmmm. 91 percent counted, and Kadima ahead by 1.1 percent. If the current numbers hold – which they ought to, give or take a seat for each party – then there will be 12 parties in the Knesset, with the right wing having 49, the religious bloc 15, the center-left 45 and the Arab bloc 11. (All terms used advisedly: Kadima has a significant right flank, Habayit Yehudi straddles the right-religious line and Hadash doesn’t fit comfortably into the “Arab” category.)
This is going to be a mess. Kadima and Likud both came out with more seats than expected, but no party has even a quarter of the mandates, and any coalition will depend on strange bedfellows. Likud might get the first crack at forming a government, but if it wants to form a coalition without Kadima or Avoda, then it will need all the right-wing and religious parties except Habayit Yehudi, and establishing terms that will please both Lieberman and Shas will be, er, tricky. If he adds Avoda, he can drop either Shas or Yisrael Beiteinu, but several Avoda MKs have expressed a preference for sitting in the opposition and there would be a revolt if Barak joined a right-wing government.
Livni’s options aren’t even that good. A center-left-religious coalition would have 60 seats, so she’d have to take the unprecedented step of adding Hadash – something the religious parties might be surprisingly comfortable with, but which many of her own MKs wouldn’t, and there’s no guarantee that Hadash would go for it. If she approaches Lieberman, then she can kiss Avoda and Meretz goodbye and can also forget about the Arab bloc supporting the government from outside, so the math doesn’t add up that way either. It looks like the only good option for either party is to repeat the Peres-Shamir rotation with Avoda or UTJ as junior partner, and hopefully to take the opportunity to reform the dysfunctional political system.
A couple of interesting things: First, the exit polls were surprisingly accurate this year. Second, there seem to have been a lot fewer wasted votes than in previous elections, with no heartbreaker parties falling just below the threshold. It seemed for a while like Balad might just miss, but it picked up in the later returns and now seems likely to get three seats.
And for what it’s worth – and it isn’t – I would have gone Hadash this year if I had a vote. They’re the anti-Lieberman, and I’ve just about had it with the fecklessness of what passes for the political mainstream.
Seed planted by Jonathan Edelstein — 10 February 2009 @ 23:57
And one more interesting thing: a significant part of the late friction in this election was between the right and the religious camp, with Shas (and to a lesser extent UTJ) seeing the secular right represented by Lieberman as the most significant threat. The last couple of days of the campaign saw Rabbi Ovadia Yosef saying that a vote for Yisrael Beiteinu was a vote for Satan, and YB activists showed that they could apply their loyalty rhetoric to Mizrahim just as easily as to Arabs. And then there were the intramural squabbles within UTJ, which are entirely too arcane for mortal men.
The Ha’aretz vote counter just went down from 91 percent of ballots counted to 88. Weird.
Seed planted by Jonathan Edelstein — 11 February 2009 @ 00:09
Agreed that a ‘rotation’ agreement might be quite likely. (And as soon as I saw your comment about 91% counted I went to the site and saw it at 88%. That is indeed strange.)
Thanks for coming by, Jonathan. I have thought many times in recent months how much I miss The Head Heeb!
Finally, as you might know if you saw one of the earlier threads here, I also toyed with (K)Hadash (in the alternate world in which I had such a choice), for the same reason you note.
Seed planted by MSS — 11 February 2009 @ 00:32
99 percent counted now: center-left and right blocs down one each, religious and Arab blocs up one. There might be a few changes around the edges as the surplus votes are ironed out, but the overall picture should stay the same, and the available options remain as above.
I got to Hadash by process of elimination: Meretz is too elitist, Avoda is decrepit and compromised, Kadima is corrupt and lacks a coherent ideology, and they get worse from there. (All right, one exception: it’s a shame that the Green-Meimad faction didn’t get in. Michael Melchior is the best man in the Knesset, bar none. Strategic voting for Kadima probably overwhelmed them this year, more’s the pity.)
Lieberman – feh. I’m glad he underperformed his polls, but ashamed that he got as many as 14 mandates. “Israel – only 40 percent as fascist as Switzerland” isn’t the catchphrase I prefer to use.
I miss THH also, but there’s no time these days – being in charge of a law firm will, unfortunately, do that.
Seed planted by Jonathan Edelstein — 11 February 2009 @ 01:30
Oh, and interesting fact number four: there will be four Druze representatives in the incoming Knesset, one each from Balad, Kadima, Likud (the unique Ayoub Kara) and Yisrael Beiteinu. Talk about spanning the spectrum.
The total number of non-Jewish MKs will be 16. All the Muslim or Christian representatives from the mainstream parties got wiped out, but I’ll take some comfort in the thought that the Arabs will outnumber Lieberman’s minions.
Seed planted by Jonathan Edelstein — 11 February 2009 @ 01:35
Wait a minute, one of the non-Jews will be one of Lieberman’s minions. Stop this damn thing already, I want to get off.
Seed planted by Jonathan Edelstein — 11 February 2009 @ 02:06
I now have nationwide vote and (projected) seat totals of yesterday’s election in Israel on my website’s blog, as reported (in Hebrew only) on the Knesset website.
To obtain the distribution of Knesset seats I used the vote surplus agreements listed in Hebrew here; unless I’m mistaken (and I should note I don’t speak Hebrew), these were as follows:
1. Labor Party – New Movement-Meretz
2. Likud – Yisrael Beitenu
3. Kadima – Greens (Hayerukim)
4. Jewish Home – National Union
5. Gil – Tzabar
6. Shas – United Torah Judaism
7. Hadash – United Arab List-Ta’al
8. Yisrael Hazaka – Green Movement-Meimad
Incidentally, I obtained the same distribution of seats as Haaretz, so I would conclude I got it right.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 11 February 2009 @ 07:05
Why not a coalition between Kadima, Likud, and Labor?
That would have a solid majority and might be able to pass some sort of electoral reform law bill at least increase the electoral threshold to at least 3% to get into the Knesset.
Seed planted by Suaprazzodi — 13 February 2009 @ 19:43
A Kadima-Likud-Labor coalition (also with UTJ, of course) is a possibility, but I would not think all that likely.
Many Labor leaders and members will want to go into opposition and re-build the party after such a devastating election.
The most right-wing sectors within Likud would not want a government that has only partners to its left, and that presumably includes Netanyahu himself (who feels, for good reason, that the electorate wants an approach more like his than Livni’s).
Yet the more right-wing (here meaning either religious-authoritarian, hawkish, or economic) parties are brought in, the less you’d get Labor wanting to hang around.
Seed planted by MSS — 13 February 2009 @ 21:51