Final elections results posted; settler party rises to 12 seats

Noam Sheizaf By Noam Sheizaf January 24, 2013 | Edit

The counting of the votes has ended, and we now have the official results for the 2013 Knesset elections. In the last 24 hours Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party has won one more seat at the expense of the United Arab List. The rest of the map is unchanged. Here are the full results:

Likud Beitenu 31; Jewish Home 12, Shas 11; United Torah Judaism 7; Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid) 19, Kadima 2, Hatnuah (Livni) 6; Labor 15; Meretz 6. Hadash 4; United Arab List 4; Balad 3

Notable changes from the previous elections: Jewish Home, associated with the settlers, rose from 5 seats to 12. Together with the success of the settlers within Likud, this were the best ever election for them ever in terms of direct representation. Their only failure was the 2 seats lost due to the fact that the far-right Otzma LeYisrael party came close but did not end up passing the Knesset threshold.

Likud-Beitenu dropped from 42 to 31, out of which only 20 are members of Netanyahu’s Likud party and the rest belong to Avigdor Lieberman (the two ran on joint ticket but kept their parties separate). A bad result for the prime minister. The Orthodox have 3 more seats.

Lapid’s Yesh Atid took Kadima’s place as the big centrist party. Combined, all the centrist parties have 27 seats, which is very similar to what Kadima won in 2009 (28).

The Palestinian parties and Hadash (which is Palestinian-Jewish) remain unchanged. The Zionist left (Meretz and Labor) became stronger – their combined representation is now at 21 (they previously had 16).

In short: Netanyahu’s right-Orthodox base lost 4 seats. The settlers and the Zionist left got stronger; the center remains the same, with Lapid simply replacing Kadima as the leader of the bloc.

I posted a more in depth analysis of the vote yesterday. You can read it here.

Noam Sheizaf

Noam Sheizaf is an independent journalist and editor. He was the founding executive director and editor-in-chief of +972 Magazine. Prior to joining +972, he worked for Tel Aviv’s Ha-ir local paper, Ynet, and the Maariv daily, where his last position was deputy editor of the weekend magazine. He is currently working on a number of documentary films.

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