At midnight on Tuesday, the deadline for Prime Minister Netanyahu to form a governing coalition expired, and now President Reuven Rivlin has given the mandate to Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party received the second-largest number of Knesset seats in the recent election. Netanyahu’s Likud won that election by a substantial margin—30 seats as opposed to Yesh Atid’s 17—but not one large enough to maintain his hold on the premiership. Haviv Rettig Gur notes that this blow
came in the immediate aftermath of some of [Netanyahu’s] most spectacular successes as prime minister, including four peace agreements with the Arab world and a trailblazing vaccination campaign. It came, too, despite a steep drop in Arab turnout and last year’s shattering of the center-left Blue and White coalition. So how did [these four factors] fail to move the needle in Netanyahu’s favor?
The answer is simple: Likud shed huge numbers of voters, dropping from over 1,352,000 votes in March 2020 to just 1,067,000 a year later, a 21 percent decline. Netanyahu’s most reliable allies, the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, also declined, shedding over 10 percent of their voters. An Israel Democracy Institute analysis of the turnout data brings Likud’s problem into sharp relief. Put simply, Likud voters stayed home.
[But Netanyahu’s] opponents . . . are no better positioned to form a coalition than he was. If Lapid and [the Yamina party leader Naftali] Bennett manage to cobble together their broad-based unity coalition, Netanyahu will have almost limitless chances to try to destabilize it from the opposition. In a coalition stretching from deep-right Yamina to progressive Meretz, there’s hardly a policy issue that won’t spark internal opposition from one party or another.
Netanyahu failed to win the first three elections because he faced a unified center-left and a mobilized Arab electorate. He failed to win the fourth one because his own voters no longer felt a need to turn out for him.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/out-of-tricks-netanyahu-again-denied-a-government-because-of-his-own-voters/