Don’t count Netanyahu out yet

Israel is scheduled to hold elections on Oct. 27, and recent polls certainly show trouble for Netanyahu. If you read the headlines about Israel’s coming election, you might conclude Benjamin Netanyahu is finished. Don’t bet on it. One recent Channel 12 poll put the current coalition-aligned bloc at 50 seats, the opposition at 59, and Arab parties at 11. That is a bad poll for Netanyahu. It is not necessarily a road map for removing him.

Israelis do not directly elect a prime minister. Instead, they elect a 120-member Knesset through nationwide proportional representation, and it takes a governing coalition controlling at least 61 seats to produce a government. That distinction is critical. Today, a party generally needs 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset. The result is political fragmentation that can look bewildering to Americans. Netanyahu has mastered it better than anyone. This is why the question “How popular is Bibi?” is often the wrong question. The better question is: Can anybody assemble 61 Knesset members without him? Netanyahu understands this arithmetic perfectly.

Religious parties — which have frequently been Netanyahu’s coalition partners — represent an increasingly important component of Israeli politics. Polls demonstrate the central problem facing Netanyahu’s opponents: Winning more seats than Likud is not the same thing as forming a government. Netanyahu’s political strength has never depended solely on winning a national popularity contest. It depends on holding together enough of Israel’s nationalist, conservative, and religious electorate to make himself indispensable to the formation of a 61-seat majority. That is what foreign observers often miss.

Israeli elections are decided not by a single popularity number and not by which politician receives the nicest headline. They are decided by blocs, parties, thresholds, and coalitions. For 30 years, nobody in Israeli politics has played that game more successfully than Benjamin Netanyahu. Therefore, count Bibi out at your own risk.