The results of the Tuesday parliamentary elections in Israel were surprising, and according to Sam Sokol, a journalist at the Israeli daily ‘Haaretz’, they are the consequence of “the failure of left-wing parties to merge and run on unified lists” and the fact that “the right had a much more disciplined unified effort.”

“The results are somewhat surprising because many of us here expected to see another round of deadlocked voting. The polling before the election pretty much showed the pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu camps neck and neck, split among the same lines that they were previously, and there was an expectation by many that we would indeed go to the sixth round of voting. What appears to have happened, however, is that there was a surge of new voters that were brought out to the polls by the far right,” he told N1’s Esmir Milavic.

Sokol explained that this led to the number of votes increasing, which in turn raised the minimum threshold for parties to get into the Knesset.

He said that the far right ran against “an atomised constellation of centrist and left-wing parties”, some of which were small enough to be pushed out of the parliament when that threshold was raised.

“It’s not so much that the electorate has shifted to the right, but it has more to do, I think, with the fact that the right had a much more disciplined unified effort than the left,” he said.

More about the fifth parliamentary elections in Israel in four years, the possible return of Benjamin Netanyahu to power, relations in the region, and Israel's position on the war in Ukraine, can be heard in the interview linked above.