Like most seasoned American disaffecteds, I was anything but excited about sitting through last year’s low-intensity Obama-Romney slugfest. Of much more significance than my night spent at Harvard Obama headquarters (correction: the IOP), I’ve had the fortune of being on the ground to experience two momentous Middle Eastern elections in the last seven months. Studying at Alexandria University this June, I watched from my balcony as hundreds of thousands of Egyptians lined the harborside Corniche to celebrate the first procedurally democratic election in their history—many having resorted to Mohamed Morsi as nothing more than the lesser of two evils. North and east a few hundred miles up the Mediterranean coast, I spent tonight in Israel’s breezy commercial capital—expecting a right-religious blowout, only to behold the most historic electoral upset in the country’s recent memory.
To be sure, Likud Beitenu, a joint list of Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, will walk away with the largest number of seats in the 19th Knesset: 31 out of 120, if the latest estimates hold. However, in light of the fact that the two parties entered the race with a combined 42, the results stand as nothing less than a severe drubbing. If they haven’t already, heads are expected to roll in the halls of Israel’s secular right-wing establishment. And far from the second-place finish for which they were angling—and which enthusiastic youth support suggested possible—Naftali Bennett’s high-tech, beardless brand of annexationism fared no better: 11 seats, something on the order of a tie for fourth place. In short: not including the ultra-Orthodox parties, which are mostly concerned with maintaining the state’s theocratic trappings and their own massive welfare allocations, the unsinkable Israeli right managed hardly more than a third of the total pie.
Having just returned from the unplanned bustle of Yesh Atid campaign headquarters, it is fair to say that the winner at Netanyahu’s expense is a strikingly handsome Yair Lapid, the son of the late secularist politician Tommy Lapid and a well-respected former news anchor at Israel’s Channel 2. Once written off as a mere personality cult, Lapid’s Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future”) party seems poised to pick up 19 seats, whose occupants would include a former Shin Bet chief, an American-born Hopkins-educated Orthodox rabbi, two Ethiopian immigrants, and as many women as men. Decidedly centrist and concerned mostly with a bevy of domestic issues (religion and state, equality in national service, education reform), Lapid’s party is now poised to make or break the prospect of a third term for Netanyahu—in the turn of a black swan event that only Yesh Atid’s on-the-ground operatives claim in hindsight to have predicted.
Despite the great surprise of tonight’s results, most pundits aver that the most likely path forward is a shakier, more compromise-ready Likud-led government. This is with good reason; but, I would urge against jumping to conclusions. First, it is important to note that the media story on Likud Beitenu’s collapse remains woefully understated: because the terms of the Likud-Yisrael Beitenu merger stipulate a parting of ways after election day, Netanyahu and Lieberman’s parties will be forced to split a grand total of 31 seats. In what appears to be the least-reported statistic of the night, this would leave the Likud at 20: the smallest predominant party in Israel’s history, holding 1/6 of the Knesset’s total seats and just barely edging Yesh Atid and Shelly Yachimovich’s center-left Labor as the largest faction.
More than just a testament to Israeli politics’ descent into schizophrenic hyper-pluralism over the course of the last eight years, this fact could induce President Shimon Peres, endowed with the power to choose which party gets to build a ruling coalition, to defy the odds and hand the job to Lapid or one of his center-left counterparts. While the mathematics and popular narrative suggest this an unlikely scenario, it is important to note that Peres—a peace-driven veteran of the Labor Party—might be looking for an excuse to intervene against a prime minister he believes to have badly fumbled the Palestinian issue. If Washington is serious about resuscitating the peace process, it is likely that President Obama will be spending the first few days of his new term in talks with Israel’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning elder statesman, figuring out a way to configure a government sans Netanyahu.
As you wade through the next few weeks of dense post-electoral coverage, the concept to follow will be coalition-building, the means by which every Israeli government since 1949 has come to be. In the likelier (author’s prediction: modestly, not overwhelmingly) case that Netanyahu is granted the opportunity to build a coalition, he will have to choose two of three constituencies to include: Yesh Atid’s secular centrists, the Jewish Home’s hard-right annexationists, and Shas’ ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi ethnics. Forced into diplomatically destructive territory by a newly-minted farther-right Likud list, it is generally understood that Netanyahu—an eternal pragmatist—would prefer to rebalance his coalition toward the center than to embrace the full weight of the right-religious bloc. In the less likely event that Lapid is called to form a coalition, it will require the full cooperation of the entire center-left bloc, as well as either the admission of either an ultra-Orthodox party or the unprecedented inclusion of Arab-Israeli factions. And finally, a shift in just a few seats from the current projections could shake up the entire map.
Whatever configuration comes into power, the story of tonight’s upset can be reduced to one word: turnout. As concerted campaigns by the left-wing NGO Peace Now and President Peres suggested, Israel’s democratic outcomes have a tendency to skew rightward because of turnout disparities between settlers and the ultra-religious on one hand, and secular urbanites and Arab citizens on the other. Conventional wisdom failed to account for the possibility that these efforts, which targeted young, urban audiences, might actually make a difference—something reflected in today’s turnout rates, the highest since 1999 and markedly high in secular urban strongholds. Conversely, turnout in the Arab sector appears to have hit rock bottom—somewhere in the neighborhood of 40%—a factor that very well might have narrowly prevented a total upset by the center-left bloc.
I urge you to stay tuned for more opinion and analysis as the 19th Knesset begins to take shape behind closed doors. At the least, expect me to argue that no Likud government, however tempered, can be expected to make serious overtures toward peace. In the mean time, enjoy the rush of an election result that, absent an Israeli Nate Silver, has thrown the entire Middle East punditocracy into chaos.