Elections, corruption scandals and assassination attempts: Netanyahu’s remarkable history of survival
Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies are on track to win the most seats in Israel’s parliament, despite weeks of polling predicting he would not survive Tuesday’s election.
The central election committee was still tallying votes on Wednesday, and it will likely take until Thursday before definitive results of the election are known.
Current forecasts suggest Netanyahu and his allies will win 54 seats, falling short of the 61 needed for a majority in the Knesset, but also leaving his main challenger Gadi Eisenkot without a clear path to government.
Israel’s longest serving prime minister, 77, has established himself as a political survivor with a cumulative 19 years in office, and could stay on as caretaker if negotiations fail to yield a new government. But beyond politics he has survived multiple assassination attempts and multiple corruption scandals.
Below, The Independent looks back on Netanyahu’s unmatched staying power at the top of Israeli politics.
Thirty years have passed since Bibi was first elected prime minister in 1996. The single most dominant figure in Israeli politics, he has spent 19 years in the role, including 12 consecutively between 2009 and 2021.
Netanyahu’s first election set the tone as he overcame opponent Shimon Peres by just 29,457 votes. Likud took charge of the 14th Knesset with just 50.4 per cent of the vote, against Labor’s 49.6.
He resigned as party leader three years later after suffering a landslide defeat to Labor challenger Ehud Barak. Netanyahu would spend a decade in the wilderness before storming to power again on the heels of the 2009 war with militants in Gaza.
The Likud party did not win the most seats this year, as foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party narrowly pulled in front. But it was Bibi who managed to form a coalition government with the remaining parties.
Voters struggled through the second term with the cost of living and mounting income equality, and Netanyahu was polling behind a Labor-Livni hybrid in the run up to the 2013 election.
A popular new centrist party, Yesh Atid, had also emerged around former journalist Yair Lapid, swallowing up a swathe of Bibi’s base. And yet, a Likud-Yisrael-Beiteinu alliance formed and Netanyahu stayed on.
Livni and current president Isaac Herzog made a challenge with the centre-left Zionist Union alliance in 2015, but lost out with just 24 seats to Likud’s 30.
April 2019 began a turbulent year as Likud failed to form a government after tying with centrist challenger Benny Gantz. A second inconclusive election followed in September, with Gantz pulling ahead 33-32. But again, neither side was able to form a government.
A third election would follow in March 2020, by which time Netanyahu had become embroiled in a corruption row, charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
