Israel Certifies Deadlocked Vote as Herzog Opens Coalition Talks

Israeli President Isaac Herzog began talks with party leaders Wednesday on who should get the first chance to build a government, hours after the country’s Central Elections Committee certified the results of the Oct. 27 parliamentary election, the BBC reported.

The certified count leaves neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor former military chief Gadi Eisenkot with the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-member Knesset without help from outside their camps.

Seats in the next Knesset

• Netanyahu’s Likud and its far-right and ultra-Orthodox allies: 53
• Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party and three other Jewish opposition parties: 48
• Arab-led parties, the United Arab List (Ra’am) and the Joint List: 19, a record

Counted together, the opposition parties and the Arab-led lists hold 67 seats, according to the committee’s figures reported by Xinhua. But all but one of the Jewish parties pledged before the vote not to rely on the Arab-led parties to form a government, the BBC reported.

Certification despite fraud claims

Committee chairman Noam Sohlberg, a Supreme Court justice, presented the results to Herzog at a ceremony in Jerusalem. He said there was no evidence of irregularities and warned that voices trying to cast doubt on the outcome posed “a real danger.” Netanyahu’s camp has claimed, without evidence, that Arab-led parties “stole” the election, according to the BBC.

How the president picks a candidate

Herzog is meeting factions in order of size, starting with the smallest, and the talks run into Thursday evening, The Jerusalem Post reported. Religious Zionism and Shas have said they will back Netanyahu. Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett and Yair Golan have said they will back Eisenkot.

The president is not bound to choose the leader of the largest party. The lawmaker he picks gets 28 days to form a coalition, with a possible 14-day extension. Herzog urged parties to drop some campaign promises to avoid another election, saying “not every commitment and promise can be fulfilled.”

Developing: The Shin Bet security service is still investigating allegations that foreign money was used to sway voting in Arab communities; the election committee said the claims are unproven and would not change the outcome.

Sources: BBC News, The Jerusalem Post, Xinhua.