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Benjamin Netanyahu may fall short in Israel election l ABC News

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Israel wakes up to a stalemate that neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor Benny Gantz can break.

Israelis went back to the polls on September 17, 2019 — the second national election in five months after Netanyahu couldn’t cobble together a governing coalition following the April vote. By midday on September 18, with more than 90% of ballots counted, the unofficial count showed Gantz’s centrist Blue and White party running essentially even with Netanyahu’s Likud, each hovering around 32 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Nobody has 61.

• With over 90% of votes counted, Blue and White and Likud were deadlocked at roughly 32 seats apiece, and neither bloc’s traditional allies add up to a majority.
• Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious alliance sits around 54-55 seats — short of the 61 needed to govern.
• Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, projected at nine seats, holds the balance of power and is demanding a unity government that excludes the ultra-Orthodox parties.

The Numbers That Define the Deadlock

The math is brutal for Netanyahu. His bloc of right-wing and religious parties — Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, Yamina and the rest — is stuck around 54 to 55 seats, several short of the 61-seat threshold that has decided every Israeli government for decades. Gantz’s side isn’t in much better shape on its own, which is exactly why the country is staring at another round of coalition horse-trading instead of a clean result.

That leaves the kingmaker role to Avigdor Lieberman, whose secular-nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu is projected at nine seats. Lieberman, a former defense minister who blew up Netanyahu’s last coalition attempt in the spring, is once again the man both sides need — and he’s made his price clear.

Lieberman’s Unity Demand

Lieberman is calling for a broad national unity government built around Likud and Blue and White together, with no seat at the table for the ultra-Orthodox factions that have propped up Netanyahu’s governments for years. It’s the same condition that torpedoed coalition talks back in April, and it hasn’t softened.

Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, projected at nine seats, has become the central kingmaker demanding a Likud-Blue and White unity government without the ultra-Orthodox parties.

The problem is that Gantz’s camp has repeatedly ruled out sitting in any government with Netanyahu himself at the head of it — not just his party. That’s not a policy disagreement; it’s about Netanyahu’s looming legal exposure, with pre-trial hearings ahead on fraud, bribery and breach-of-trust allegations that have hung over his campaign for months. Blue and White’s position leaves Lieberman’s preferred outcome — unity, minus the ultra-Orthodox — technically on the table but practically stuck, because it still requires Netanyahu to either lead it or step aside.

The Joint List’s Blocking Power

Complicating things further for Netanyahu is the Arab-majority Joint List, which surged to roughly 12 to 13 seats and emerged as the third-largest faction in the Knesset. That bloc has no interest in propping up a Netanyahu-led government, and its size alone makes it harder for the incumbent’s camp to find any alternate path to 61 that doesn’t run through Blue and White or Lieberman.

Netanyahu’s coalition math from April to September has barely moved, and the same actors — Lieberman, the ultra-Orthodox parties, and now a bigger Joint List — are back in the same standoff, just with an extra election’s worth of exhaustion attached to it. For more on how the Trump administration’s own moves at the UN around Palestinian statehood factored into the backdrop of this vote, see how Trump condemned moves to recognize a Palestinian state weeks earlier.

President Reuven Rivlin now inherits the job of figuring out who gets the first crack at forming a government, and neither Netanyahu nor Gantz has anything close to a mandate to work with. Whether this ends in a genuine unity deal, a third election, or Netanyahu finally losing his grip on the Knesset altogether is still an open question — one that played out in the months that followed.