By Scotty Schenck, photo editor
Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s party won the most seats in last night’s election in the Knesset, Israel’s house of government.
There are 120 seats in the parliament of Israel and Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party won 30, the most of any party, according to BBC. Several groups in Israel compete during elections and multiple parties can receive seats. No one group has ever been elected to a majority of the seats in parliament.
“Against all odds: great victory for the Likud. A major victory for the people of Israel!” Netanyahu tweeted yesterday.
The opposition of the Likud party, the left-wing Zionist Party won 24 seats. While Likud has the most seats, for Netanyahu to be reinstated as prime minister, he will have to gain support from the other parties in parliament. In order for a person to be elected prime minister, candidates need to receive at least 61 of the 120 votes. For Netanyahu, that means he needs votes from other parties whose seats total at least 31, in addition to all the votes from his own party. The Lukid Party said in a statementthat the elections for prime minister would be completed in the next two to three weeks, according to BBC.
Both parties claimed to change government if they formed a new coalition. Leader of the Zionist Union, Isaac Herzog, said he would address economic issues of Israel.
“I promise: I will be a prime minister to everyone,” said Herzog to Israel’s Knesset on Monday, according to the New York Times. “For right and left, for settlers, Haredim, Druze, Arabs, Circassians; I will be prime minister for the center and for the periphery.”
In a last moment effort to appeal to right-wing voters, Netanyahu claimed if he returned as prime minister there would be no Palestinian state, part of a solution that many claim to be a peaceful settlement of long-standing differences between Palestinians and Israelis. The two-state solution would give land to the Palestinians from Israel. Herzog said he would also support a two-state solution.
“I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel,” Netanyahu said in a video interview with NRG, an Israeli news site.
Both the Zionist Union and the Likud parties will be searching for support from the other parties who have won seats and do political wheeling and dealing to secure the seat of prime minister for their party’s leader. The Joint List party, an Israeli Arab party who are expected to side with Herzog, won 14 seats, the Yesh Atid party won 11, Kulanu Party won 10, and the remaining 31 seats were won by Yisrael Beitenu, Bayit Yehudi, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Meretz individually, according to BBC.
Northeastern freshman computer science and business major Amit Palkovic was born in Belgium, but spent a majority of her life in Israel after her family moved there when she was 4 years old. Palkovic said she supported Herzog and the Zionist Union party,
“I wanted to vote but I can’t. They only allow diplomats (to vote) if you’re not in Israel,” she said. “We knew it was going to be hard to beat Bibi, I feel like people were scared to change to someone new.”
Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
