Why we may not know who's won Israel's election even after the votes are counted



Imagine you held an election, and lots of people claimed they’d won. But nobody really did. Or lots of people claimed they’d won and nobody really did.
Confused? You should be. Welcome to Israel’s spectacularly unpredictable election reality, one month before we go to the polls.
Here’s a really complicated take on how things look right now — at time of writing, late in the morning of March 7. I take no responsibility for how different things might look a few hours from now, or whenever you happen to be reading this.

And don’t blame me for the complicated stuff either, which I’ve tried to present in three bite-sized complicated pieces; it’s not my system; we just live with it.


1. You simply can’t rely on the polls.

I realize that by writing the sub-headline above, I’m essentially saying you can stop reading right now. Still with me, nonetheless? Then let me elaborate. I’m not impugning the skills, fairness and forensic ambition of Israel’s pollsters. I am saying that with 47 parties having registered for the April 9 elections, predicting how they’ll fare is, if not a fool’s errand, then a masochist’s one.
Given that our redoubtable pollsters are working with relatively small samples, that polls are not generally conducted face-to-face, that not all voters always tell pollsters the truth, that not all pollsters always survey the Arab community in Arabic, and — especially — that many, many Israelis simply haven’t decided who they’re going to vote for, there’s absolutely no way at this stage to credibly predict the composition of the next Knesset.

(Our political correspondent, Raoul Wootliff writes: “You might want to add that the entire process of predicting seat distribution is highly dubious in the first place, given that the performance of the small parties can have an outsized effect on the final numbers.


2. But Blue and White is clearly winning

I interviewed Lapid at an English-language event in Tel Aviv on Wednesday night and, in his emphatic telling, a result like that on election day would mean Blue and White has won, and Gantz will be prime minister.
How so? Because, according to Lapid, the biggest party wins the elections, period. And all the “bloc” talk is a red herring.
When I put it to Lapid that, actually, in 2009, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima won 28 seats to Likud’s 27 but, last time I checked, Tzipi Livni had not been Israel’s prime minister, he explained that this was the exception that proved the rule.

3. Except, I don’t get it


But, it seems to me, when all the votes are in, and all the seats distributed, we could also plausibly find ourselves in a situation wherein Likud and its so-called natural allies can’t quite muster a 61-seat coalition, but neither can Blue and White. A situation, that is, in which the center, left and Arab parties have enough seats to deprive Netanyahu of a majority, but in which Blue and White, which has indicated it would not include Arab parties in a coalition, can’t muster a majority either. Blue and White would have won the election, for sure, except it wouldn’t necessarily have won the election. (That sentence is not a typo.)

I think I mentioned this: We don’t know.
And we have strayed into this territory before. In 1984, when all else failed, Shimon Peres (Labor Alignment) and Yitzhak Shamir (Likud) reluctantly agreed to “rotate” the prime ministership, with Peres taking the first two years and Shamir the second. Just imagine, we could be looking at a rotating prime ministership, in which one of the constituent parties is also rotating its leader. Quite the dizzying spectacle. How fortunate that the job of prime minister is so simple and straightforward.

And finally

The irritating conclusion, as of March 7 slightly later in the afternoon: Not only are the results of these elections anybody’s guess — as of this writing, a month before polling day — but that also might remain the case after we’ve voted.