'I've Never Seen Something Like This': Netanyahu Faces His Biggest Test Yet In 'Extraordinary' Election

The stakes of this election are so high that thousands of Israelis living abroad are flying home to cast their ballots.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has spent the better part of the past two decades leading the country, will face one of the toughest battles of his political career on Tuesday.

Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history and is no stranger to political comebacks — including when he was ousted from power in 2021, only to regain his position about 18 months later.

“It took him just a year to manage to bring down the government, and then there was another election. He came back, and he’ll be trying to do that yet again,” Anshel Pfeffer, The Economist’s Israel correspondent and author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, told HuffPost.

But many things have changed in just the past few years, and Israel has taken a hard-right turn. Netanyahu is the first sitting Israeli leader to stand trial on corruption charges, has pushed through a controversial agenda egged on by his far-right coalition partners, and has refused to accept any responsibility for the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks that happened under his watch — all while the country’s international standing has taken a major hit amid the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran, as well as the surge in settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

The upcoming election, analysts say, will be a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership since his return to power.

“I do feel that this time around there is a difference because we were never in this situation that we experienced [on Oct. 7], so this is the worst tragedy that happened to Israel since its creation,” said Ksenia Svetlova, an executive director of the Regional Organization for Peace, Economics and Security and a former member of the Israeli Knesset, or parliament.

“Not even the debacle of the October War can be compared to that,” she said, referring to the 1973 Yom Kippur War that broke out when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel.

Parties that aren’t connected to Netanyahu could have a good shot at taking control of the government, as long as they’re able to put aside their differences enough to work together when it matters, said Dahlia Scheindlin, a pollster and political consultant.

Parties outside the prime minister’s coalition, she said, “clearly have a majority as far as it looks — unless we’re terribly surprised.”

The Race To Create A Government

Parliamentary elections in Israel are scheduled to take place every four years, but they can happen more often. The country uses a proportional representation voting system, meaning parties are allocated a set number of seats in the Knesset based on the share of the vote they get. But they can only gain parliamentary representation if they cross an electoral threshold of 3.25%.

No single party has ever managed to secure an outright majority, so the Israeli government has always been a combination of different factions and parties. Once the election results are announced,........

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