November 3, 2022: Benjamin Netanyahu, the next Prime Minister
The coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister, appears to be making a dramatic return to power in Israel on Wednesday, 2nd November 2022, after counting of more than 84 percent of the vote. Post-poll polls in Israel indicated Netanyahu and his allies winning enough seats to return to power after a three-and-a-half-year political stalemate. Post-poll polls by three major Israeli TV stations indicated Netanyahu and his allies could win 65 seats in the 120-member parliament.
‘The Times of Israel’ reported that the Central Election Committee has so far counted 4,081,243 votes, of which 24,201 votes were declared invalid. The report said that according to the calculations so far, the Netanyahu-led coalition will win 65 seats, but this figure may change, when all the votes have been counted. Israel went to the polls on Tuesday.
This is the fifth time in less than four years that general elections are being held to break the political deadlock that has crippled the country. About 67.8 million citizens were eligible to vote for the election to the 25th Parliament (Knesset) in Israel. Israel’s Central Elections Committee announced that about 71.3% of eligible voters headed to the ballot box, 3.9% more than the last elections of March 2021 and the highest tally since 2015. Political deadlock has continued in Israel since 73-year-old Netanyahu was charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in 2019. Netanyahu was Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. The new wave of violence, which started in March 2022, helped ultranationalist national religious alliance lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir, who ran on a law-and-order campaign promising to impose tough measures to quell unrest in the West Bank. Mr. Ben-Gvir’s party is a part of the Netanyahu alliance.
—by Team DiGiNews360