Record turnout, same deadlock: Who lost Israel’s election? - from the editor
The Jerusalem Post · NERIA BARR ·
Israel voted in record numbers, yet remains divided and without a government. The election settled little, if anything
Israel voted on October 27 as it had not in more than a quarter of a century. Turnout reached 77.7%, the highest since 1999, and thousands of Israelis living abroad flew home just to cast their ballots. It changed almost nothing. Before the election, the great fear was a deadlock that would send the country back to the ballot box, as happened five times between 2019 and 2022. That fear is still with us.
On the morning after, the question on my mind was not who won, but who lost. The answer, I am afraid, is the people of Israel, who came out of it still in limbo: divided and without a government.
The pollsters lost too, and that is where this issue begins. Our cover story comes from The Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Zvika Klein, who sat with Netanyahu at Likud’s campaign headquarters after 2 a.m., heard him call the race “an even tie,” and thought he was living in a fantasy world. Netanyahu was right. The final surveys of Channels 12 and 13 and Kan missed Likud by six to eight seats, and an 11-seat gap between two broadcasters’ estimates went largely unexamined. Klein does not spare the pollsters, or his own newsroom. He asks what editors owe readers abroad who depend on them to explain a country they do not live in, and promises a review of the Post’s own polling arrangements.
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