The Majority Still Requires The Votes

The least cooperative participant in Israel's election on Tuesday night was arithmetic.

Exit polls suggested neither Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc nor the parties opposing him had a straightforward path to a governing majority. Likud was projected to remain the largest party, while the opposition grouping led by Gadi Eisenkot was projected to edge Netanyahu's coalition. Neither description is the same as having enough seats to govern. The calculator has declined to accept a victory speech as an additional coalition partner.

These are exit polls, not final results. The Guardian reports that negotiations could take weeks and that another election remains possible. Netanyahu could remain in office as caretaker during a stalemate. Anyone announcing that the government has definitively changed is getting ahead of both the count and the negotiations.

What makes the arithmetic politically revealing is the role of Israeli Arab parties, projected to win as many as 18 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Their votes could help determine who can form a government. Eisenkot ruled out governing with those parties before the election, even though a coalition including them could theoretically produce a majority.

That leaves a difficult sales pitch: we urgently need to replace this government, but please do not mention some of the elected representatives whose support could make replacing it possible.

Netanyahu approached Arab participation from the other direction, suggesting that the left and Arabs were trying to steal the election. The Central Elections Committee rejected the claim, saying it had seen no evidence of systematic tampering. It also rejected a last-minute effort by Netanyahu and several other parties to keep polling stations open beyond the deadline.

A surge in citizens voting is not, by itself, evidence that an election is being stolen. It is one of the things elections are designed to accommodate. Calling the participants alarming does not make their ballots less real.

The distinction matters beyond the campaign's theatrics. Israeli citizens of Palestinian origin make up about a fifth of the population. Their participation concerns representation in the government that exercises power over their lives, not merely whether another party finds the resulting seat chart inconvenient.

This election follows years of war, instability and intense argument about Netanyahu's leadership. Those stakes deserve more than another declaration that the country cannot survive without the person currently asking it to renew his employment. A leader's political survival and a country's survival are not interchangeable line items.

For now, the responsible conclusion is uncertainty: votes still have to establish the result, and parties still have to establish a government. The opposition's enthusiasm does not settle the first task. Netanyahu's warnings do not settle the second.

The electorate supplies the seats. Politicians may negotiate over them, but they do not get to subtract the citizens they would rather not count on.