Making Sense of the Israeli Election

With 99.5% of the vote counted, Ha'aretz reports a solid, but not stunning, victory for Ehud Olmert and the nascent Kadima party (28 seats), which occupies the center-right. Labor, center-left, got 20 seats. Shas (Sephardic religious) climbed to 13, and Yisrael Beitenu, a newish Russian immigrant nationalist party has 12 seats. The true surprise is that Likud has a meagre 11 seats. Likud or its predecessors (Gahal, Herut) have been in the the top two since 1955. Of course, Kadima is a successor party to Likud, so this really doesn't break the streak, but it may represent a major realignment in Israeli politics. This is also only the second time in Israeli history that the top party has held fewer than 34 seats; the previous time was Ehud Barak's Labour-led government in 1999, and we all know how well that went. In addition, this election saw the lowest turnout in history, 63.2%.

A quick look:

Party	2006	2003	Position
Kadima	28	0*	Center-Right
Labour	20	19	Center-Left
Shas	13	11	Religious
Yisrael Beitenu	12	3**	Right
Likud	11	38	Right
Nat'l Union - Nat'l Religious	9	10	Right/Religious
Pensioners	7	0	Single-issue (leans left)
United Torah Judaism	6	5	Religious
Meretz-Yachad	4	6	Socialist
Arab parties	10	8	Arab (leans left)
Shinui	0	15	Center
Others	0	5

* Kadima had 14 members before the election, mostly defectors from Likud
** Yisrael Beitenu was a member of the National Union in 2003.
Bold indicates a party likely to join Kadima's ruling coalition.

Add up the boldfaced numbers, and you get 55. At least 60 seats are needed to govern. And this already includes the 7 pensioners, who are confident all their demands will be met - and with good reason; they'll be key mercenaries in coalition-building. But Olmert still needs two more members, and without defections from Likud, he'll need to embrace the religious parties or bring Likud back into the fold, or try to woo Meretz and an Arab party; but I doubt he's willing to move that far left. Basically, the political spectrum is so broadly distributed that any coalition will have to embrace a large part of the political spectrum.