Israel's highest turnout in decades brings Benyamin Netanyahu back to power.
The majority with total right-wing traction, which led in this year and a few months from the opposition, is accredited by the exit polls of the major TV stations of 61/62 seats out of 120 in the Knesset, as many as they need to govern the country.
'King Bibi' thus regained the scepter in the fifth elections in 3 years, relegating the variegated block of his major opponent, the current Prime Minister Yair Lapid, to 54/55 seats.
A victory - if the actual counting of votes confirms the exits - which brings the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Israel back to command, even more so than the father of the homeland David Ben Gurion.
His Likud had 30 seats, Lapid's party 24. The vote also marks the boom in religious Zionism of Itamar Ben Gvir, the anti-Arab right-wing racist radical who wants to annex the entire West Bank without granting Palestinians rights , which intends to relax the rules of engagement for soldiers and agents and to pickax the Supreme Court, a bulwark of Israeli constitutionality.
He - and his companion Bezalel Smotrich - are credited with 14/15 seats: a historic victory, according to all analysts and commentators.
A victory that Ben Gvir has already mortgaged by asking the Ministry of Public Security in recent days.
It will be difficult for Netanyahu to do without those seats, even if the US and the Gulf countries, led by the United Arab Emirates, have warned the former (and future) premier that the
Ben Gvir's entry into the government can only have negative repercussions on the Abrahamic Agreements.
Then there are the religious parties, the Labor, the left Meretz, the Arab Islamist party of Mansour Abbas (great ally of Lapid), while the communists of Hadash Taal remain outside.
The striking figure was however that of the turnout: at 20 it was 66.3%, almost 6 points more than the elections of March 2021. In any case, the most crowded polls since 1999. Aware of the stakes to break the political impasse which has gripped Israel, all parties - none excluded - have repeatedly called their electorate to go to the polls.
Starting with Prime Minister Yair Lapid who - after voting early in the morning in the polling station near his home in a suburb of Tel Aviv together with his wife Lihi - urged the Israelis to express their choices.
"Go and vote today for the future of our children and that of our country".
Benyamin Netanyahu was no less.
As done in all past elections, the
former premier hammered from his Facebook site incessantly calling his Likud supporters to go to the polls.
Today he toured some shopping malls claiming that the turnout of the left was high, while the right is out shopping.
Ben Gvir made the same pressing, who even rented a helicopter to go to the central area of the country.
Ben Gvir - against whom the entire current Lapid block has built a wall denouncing what he has defined as racist and fascist ideology - has voted in Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank.
In the evening the final appeal by both Lapid and Netanyahu: both to mobilize their voters underlined that the blocks were "head to head".
But in the end, the Wizard, Netanyahu's other nickname, seems to have won.
Now - if the real data confirm the exit pools - it is up to President Isaac Herzog to start the consultations: and the name at the top of the list is again that of Benyamin Netanyahu.
