As the election results come in, what did the people say? – analysis

The first message the voters is that they don't care if Netanyahu will begin standing trial in two weeks on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

By HERB KEINON
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures after speaking to supporters following the announcement of exit polls in Israel's election at his Likud party headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel March 3, 2020 (photo credit: REUTERS/AMIR COHEN)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gestures after speaking to supporters following the announcement of exit polls in Israel's election at his Likud party headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel March 3, 2020
(photo credit: REUTERS/AMIR COHEN)
The final tally is not yet in, and it is not clear exactly how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will cobble together a coalition. But there are certain messages that emerged loud and clear from the nearly 4.6 million ballots cast in Monday’s elections – with the soldiers’ votes still left to be counted – that gave the right bloc 59 seats, the center-left block 54 and Avigdor Liberman seven.
The first message the voters sent is that they don’t care if Netanyahu will begin standing trial in two weeks on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Well, it’s not exactly that they don’t care, but rather, they think he can do both – be the prime minister and a defendant.
Blue and White’s entire campaign centered around the notion that it is unthinkable that someone can serve as premier while on trial. The party’s leaders – Benny Gantz, Moshe Ya’alon, Yair Lapid and Gabi Ashkenazi – shouted from every microphone that this breaks all norms of good governance and is something that simply cannot be.
The electorate thought otherwise.
Israel went to the polls on Monday with eyes wide open, knowing full well – perhaps too well – what Netanyahu is being accused of. And the message they sent is that they don’t care: He can still govern.
Some will say he can govern because the law does not stipulate that an indicted prime minister has to step down, only an indicted minister. Others will say he can govern because the case against him has been cooked up by an overzealous state’s attorney.
Whatever the reason, the beating Blue and White – which ran almost solely on this issue – took at Netanyahu’s hands is a clear message that what Blue and White said was unthinkable is very thinkable to many people.
This does not necessarily mean that those who cast ballots for Netanyahu think he is innocent. Rather, they think he can continue to serve as head of the government until guilt or innocence is completely proven.
The second message sent is that the country, or most of the country, does not believe Israel’s democracy is in danger. It is fair to say that those on the Left, those in the media and those in academia are not the only ones who want to live in a working, vibrant, functioning democracy. So do – despite the stereotypes and caricatures – the vast majority of Likud voters.
That they cast a vote for Netanyahu shows that unlike the doomsday sayers, they do not believe Netanyahu poses a threat to the country’s democracy. They did not buy Blue and White’s slogan that Netanyahu is Israel’s version of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Some argue that what Netanyahu is really after is to pass two Knesset laws that would save him from the grips of the law: The first is a law giving him retroactive immunity; the second would be a Supreme Court bypass law so that the court could not strike down the retroactive immunity bill.
According to this school of thought, the message the electorate was sending is that they think Netanyahu deserves immunity. The problem with that argument is that if that were indeed the case, and the elections could be interpreted as a referendum on granting Netanyahu immunity, then on January 28 Netanyahu would not have withdrawn his immunity request from the Knesset.
Why did he withdraw his immunity request, opening himself up to a trial? Because he realized a protracted battle for immunity in the Knesset would be bad for his campaign, and because some of those votes he was after – and recovered on Monday – might have been lost had he unabashedly said this is what he was gunning for.
And the third message from the elections: Life in the country is not as bad as the voters are told.
On March 1, a day before the election, The New York Times ran a large piece headlined: “Israel, ‘Start-up Nation,’ Groans Under Strains of Growth and Neglect.”
In it, the reporters chronicled many of the country’s ills, including overcrowded roads, stuffed trains, poor schools, jammed-packed hospitals, long lines for MRIs, a brain drain – something we have been hearing about now for decades, even as the population, number of immigrants and returning Israelis continues to grow.
The Times piece could have been a Blue and White campaign brochure. Reading that article, and hearing the Blue and White and Labor-Gesher-Meretz ads over the last year often touching on the same issues, one could justifiably ask: If things are so bad, if the infrastructure is so shaky, the education so poor, the healthcare so faulty, why do people keep voting for Netanyahu, as they did this time as well?
There are many reasons, a key one being that there is significant dissonance between how bad people are told things are and their actual lives. People are not stupid. If things were that bad and if everything was falling apart – including the country’s democracy, its infrastructure and its deterrence capabilities – they would not continue to vote Likud. Party fealty runs deep, but people also want better lives.
One of the main takeaways from the election is that more people than not believe that with all the problems, their lives are not bad, have improved materially a great deal over the last decade, and therefore there is no need for a change. Especially when the party promising change ran a lackluster campaign that did little to convince the public how exactly it would do things differently.