Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decisive victory in Israel’s general election is testimony to his dogged determination as a political campaigner, says Financial Times.
The Israeli people have made their choice in a free and fair ballot. Yet his return to a fourth term as prime minister can only prompt feelings of dismay in western capitals and across the Middle East.
Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party had lagged in opinion polls and Israelis seemed to be suffering a serious bout of “Bibi-fatigue”. Instead, the country has returned a politician whose rejection of an independent Palestinian state was confirmed unequivocally on the eve of the poll. Even among Israel’s friends in the west, this is bound to provoke considerable unease.
Netanyahu’s victory is far from being a landslide. The election result demonstrates that Israelis remain implacably divided about the Likud leader. In order to govern he will have to form a complex coalition. If Netanyahu won most Knesset seats, the explanation lies in part because Isaac Herzog, his uncharismatic centre-left opponent, could not establish himself as a national figure.
But Netanyahu’s victory was also the product of his own alarmist campaign. Desperate to attract rightwing voters, he rejected a Palestinian state, saying it would give “attack grounds to . . . radical Islam”. His remark that Israel’s Arabs were “streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations” to put “right-wing rule in danger” had a racist undertone. His supporters call him “King Bibi” but his campaign hardly earned him the title of father of the nation.