On the Wednesday morning after Israel’s elections, the leaders of the Jewish state’s two largest political parties were immersed in negotiations with smaller parties aimed at forming a ruling coalition, as neither Kadima’s Tzipi Livni, nor the Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu, received enough votes to form a government on their own.
The latest vote tally showed Kadima with 28 out of 120 parliamentary seats, and Likud appeared to have 27. The Yisrael Beitenu party of Avigdor Lieberman scored 15 seats and the Labor Party of Defense Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak held 13 seats.
All parties currently represented in the Knesset will recommend to Israeli President Shimon Peres which leader to choose for the first attempt to form a government. The prime minister-designate then has six weeks to form a coalition.
The leader of the party with the most votes usually is given the chance to form the next government. But the right-wing bloc, of which Likud is the largest party and Yisrael Beitenu the second largest, seemed to have won significantly more votes than the left – 65 to 55. However, Livni has indicated that she is willing to form a national unity government led initially by Netanyahu and later by her, in rotation.
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