Benjamin Netanyahu returns to the rescue .
In the last elections in Israel, which registered the highest turnout (over 66%) at the polls in decades , precisely since 1999, the majority with total right-wing traction, which led in this year and a few months from the opposition, with 97% of the polled vote obtained about 65 seats (out of 120 in the Knesset) , followed by that of Yair Lapid with 50 and the 5 obtained by the left-wing Arabs of Hadash Taal.
A victory that brings the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Israel back to command, even more so than the father of the homeland David Ben Gurion. His Likud had 30 seats, Lapid's party 24. Netanyahu, 73, was prime minister twice, from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2009 to 2021 .
Boom in religious Zionism by Itamar Ben Gvir, the anti-Arab right-wing radical with a racist streak who wants to annex the entire West Bank without granting Palestinians rights. He - and his companion Bezalel Smotrich - are credited with 14/15 seats: a historic victory, according to all analysts and commentators, which Ben Gvir has already mortgaged by asking the Ministry of Public Security in recent days.
It will be difficult for Netanyahu to do without those seats, even if the US and the Gulf countries, led by the Arab Emirates, have warned him that Ben Gvir's entry into the government can only have negative repercussions on the Abrahamic Agreements . Then there are the religious parties, the Labor, the left Meretz, the Arab Islamist party of Mansour Abbas (great ally of Lapid), while the communists of Hadash Taal remain outside.
(Unioneonline / D)
