Binyamin Netanyahu is on course to head a more hawkish and pro-settler government following Tuesday's elections, even though final opinion polls show a drop in the number of seats his rightwing electoral alliance is expected to win.
A series of polls on Friday – the last day permitted for the publication of opinion surveys – showed Likud-Beiteinu likely to take 32-35 seats in the 120-place parliament. Its nearest rival, Labour, is predicted to get 16 or 17, and the extreme right Jewish Home is expected to finish third, with 11-13 seats.
But around 15% of voters are undecided. If a substantial proportion of those actually vote on Tuesday, they could have a marked impact on the parties' final tallies. Turnout in Israeli elections is traditionally high, although it has fallen in recent years. It is expected to be about 70% in this election.
Although Likud-Beiteinu is set to be the biggest party by some distance, support for the alliance between Netanyahu's Likud party and former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu has steadily fallen during the campaign. The American election strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who advocated the merger and is advising the alliance, predicted it would win 45 seats, and polls a month ago were forecasting 39 seats.
Support has drained to the ultra-nationalist, pro-settler Jewish Home, led by Netanyahu's former chief of staff Naftali Bennett, in an indication of the hardening of opinion on the right of the Israeli political spectrum. "This election will likely mark an acceleration of Israel's long-predicted … journey toward a hegemonic nationalism resembling apartheid-era South Africa," wrote Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and north Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, in Foreign Policy this week.
Netanyahu has sought to stem the loss of votes by appealing to the pro-settler vote. He would seek a "real and fair solution" with the Palestinians "and that certainly doesn't include driving out hundreds of thousands of Jews who live in the suburbs of Jerusalem and in the suburbs of Tel Aviv, in the Ariel bloc," he told the Jerusalem Post on Friday. Ariel is a huge settlement which juts deep into the West Bank, almost reaching the Jordan valley.
Asked in an interview with the Hebrew-language Ma'ariv if he would guarantee that no settlement would be uprooted in the next four years, Netanyahu said: "Yes, correct. The days of bulldozers flattening settlements are behind us, not in front of us."
Speculation is turning towards the complexion of the coalition government Netanyahu will assemble in the coming weeks. Most analysts expect him to form a rightwing-religious block, though he may seek to include at least one of the centrist parties to add breadth to the coalition.
"Israel's right wing has become more hardline, and Netanyahu is a relative moderate. He is out of kilter with much of his own party," said David Horovitz, founding editor of the Times of Israel. "He would prefer another party to his left in the coalition. He will not want to be the most dovish person in his government."
Labour has said it will lead the opposition rather than join a Netanyahu-led coalition. But the centrist parties Yesh Atid, led by former television personality Yair Lapid, and Hatnua, led by former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, have not ruled out becoming coalition partners. An attempt to form a centre-left alliance between these three parties, potentially capable of challenging the Likud-Beiteinu alliance, failed.
The inclusion of a centrist party may help Netanyahu repair relations between the Israeli government and the Obama administration, which have been seriously strained over the past year.
The Israeli elections: facts and figures
Israeli voters go to the polls on Tuesday to elect the 19th Knesset (Israeli parliament). There are 34 parties competing for 120 seats.
There are 5.1 million eligible voters in Israel, plus another 600,000 abroad.
Israel uses a kind of proportional representation, called the list system. The public votes for a party, not individuals, with the proportion of votes determining the number of seats allocated to a party. So if a party gets 10% of the popular vote, it is allocated 12 seats – and the first 12 candidates on its list become members of the Knesset.
There is a minimum threshold of 2% of the popular vote to gain a seat.
No party has ever won an overall majority, so every government in Israel's history has been a coalition.
The leader of the party with the biggest number of seats is asked to put together a coalition within 42 days. If he or she cannot, it falls to the leader of the next biggest party. Coalition horse-trading can continue for days or weeks.
Likud-Beiteinu, the rightwing political alliance led by the current prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is expected to be the biggest party. Netanyahu may seek to bring religious parties into a coalition to gain a majority, or he may seek the support of centrist parties. Or he could invite both to create a broader coalition.
Labour, expected to be the second biggest party, has said it will not join a coalition led by Likud-Beiteinu.
