After an uncharacteristically
This follows elections which had been held on April 9th and September 17th, 2019, and March 2nd, 2020. These were sparked when Binyamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition couldn't agree on military service for Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews. The April elections made this quandary even worse by making it impossible for Netanyahu to form his natural coalition without both the Haredi parties and the staunchly secular Yisrael Beiteinu, and the September and March elections did not resolve this issue.
In the September campaign, Yisrael Beiteinu started pushing for a 'unity' government between Netanyahu and centre-left leader Benny Gantz (former head of the IDF), and finally, in April 2020, this is what happened. Gantz was essentially pressured by a combination of the pandemic, Netanyahu's sheer stubbornness, and a vague sense of patriotic duty, into caving and agreeing a 'rotation' coalition that would allow Netanyahu to remain Prime Minister until the end of 2021, before Gantz would take over. Joining the coalition was a heterogeneous combination of careerists and single-issue parties: the Haredi parties, two-thirds of Labor, a one-woman centrist party called Gesher, and a settler-interest party called the Bayit Yehudi. Obviously this hasn't worked in Gantz's favour, and few believed Netanyahu actually intended to honour the agreement, especially after Gantz's centre-left party spectacularly split in two over the agreement. Mass defections from both Netanyahu and Gantz's parties over the government's budget have prompted a fourth round of elections.
Netanyahu is also the subject of a massive corruption investigation. The Attorney General (who is independent of the government) announced in the middle of the April election campaign that he intended to indict Netanyahu in three corruption cases, but the final decision on indictment was delayed until October, after the September elections. Netanyahu was eventually indicted in November, but refused to resign. Netanyahu has even suggested legislation to make himself immune from prosecution while Prime Minister, but doesn't have a majority in the Knesset for that.
This has all contributed to a growing sense that Netanyahu's party, and alliance, is little more than a vehicle to shield him from prosecution. Many of his natural coalition partners went into opposition after the March elections, and in December 2019, Gideon Sa'ar, a long-standing cabinet minister, challenged Netanyahu for the party leadership. He lost, but for these elections, he's founded his own party, called New Hope, hoping that, in essence, the wider right-wing voter base will prefer him to Netanyahu.
So who's running?
Everybody. Pretty much the entire population of Israel is running in these elections. In April 2019, a whopping 47 parties put forward candidates. In September, only 32 lists were put forward, although this was mostly because multiple parties formed blocs to cross the electoral threshold. These blocs mostly disintegrated before the March elections, and this time they've been shaken up yet again.
That said, a number of parties, some of them founded for these elections, have decided upon reflection to sit this one out. This includes The Israelis, a centre-left outfit founded by Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, which has disbanded after 36 days; and Tnufa, another centre-left offering, founded by former Yesh Atid MK Ofer Shelah after his old party refused to hold a leadership election, only to wind up his new party 42 days later. Also sitting this one out after two years of existence are Telem, a centrist party founded by former IDF chief Moshe Ya'alon, which ran with Kachol Lavan last time but couldn't find a partner on this occasion; and Gesher, a centrist party whose founder, Orly Levy, has left to join Likud. One more established party, the religious-right Bayit Yehudi, is also taking a break; they've endorsed Yamina, who in turn have promised a ministerial post to Bayit Yehudi leader Hagit Moshe if they end up in government.
Israel has a nationwide party-list PR system which allows small parties to flourish, and this has allowed extraordinary political fragmentation in recent years. The threshold to get into the Knesset was raised to 3.25% in 2014 to try and combat this, but it hadn't really worked until the April 2019 elections, when the two largest parties sucked large numbers of voters away from the smaller parties, so enough parties came perilously close to the threshold to terrify some of them into forming larger alliances in September. While these alliances were mostly short-lived, the idea of alliances seems to have survived.
Here are the parties with the best chances of winning seats (with the number of seats they had when the Knesset was dissolved for this election):
Israelis get to decide between this over-long menu of choices on
So who's winning?
Obviously at this stage it's difficult to tell who'll win, not least since 'winning' is a matter of forming a coalition of 61 or more MKs after the election (just ask Netanyahu), and after April 2020 coalitions need not fit neatly into ideological blocs, but you can find the most recent polls at Knesset Jeremy. At the moment, New Hope appear to be the main competitors to Netanyahu's Likud.
Some good, non-paywalled English-language news sources include The Times of Israel, i24 News, and Jerusalem Post.
So who should win, and what coalition should they form? Who do you think will win, and do you think Israel should change its electoral system to something that doesn't generate 1,000 new parties an hour?
Also, should Israel introduce direct Prime Ministerial elections to try and break the current deadlock? This idea came (back) to the fore after the September election. That said, Israel experimented with this in the 1990s and it didn't work, so I'd probably go with no.
