Pollsters expect a close call but election #5 could be a gamechanger

Netanyahu has his nose just in front. But if he does win, his legacy will be forever stained by creating a racist powerhouse that resembles antisemites of the past. 

The final polls conducted by Israel’s three main television stations in advance of today’s elections were suspiciously but perhaps prudently identical. The polls differed on details but not on the bottom line: Dead heat, hung parliament, continued paralysis, escalating rhetoric, growing polarisation and then back to the ballot boxes, “cos here we go again”.

Sixty seats for the “Only Bibi” bloc, comprised of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and its similar-thinking satellites, the networks uniformly announced, and 60 for the “Anyone but Bibi” camp, an ad-hoc coalition of disparate Jewish and Arab parties united for the sole purpose of blocking the former prime minister from returning to power.

The pollsters’ findings mirror widespread public expectations. “What was will be again, there’s nothing new under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes noted stoically. But most Israelis would concur with the maxim wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Israelis don’t see any discernable reason to believe they will be any more successful in their fifth attempt to break the political deadlock than they were in their previous four efforts. Voter participation may not decline but voter engagement is spent, which is why the so-called election campaign preceding the vote existed in name only. Most voters, it seems, had tuned out and switched off.

There were no mass rallies, few home meetings and hardly any “meet and greet” tours. Those that took place, as Netanyahu repeatedly discovered to his great embarrassment, were notable mainly for the absence of participants.