Israeli politics is nothing if not complicated. And the last few elections – which have come with great rapidity, in an effort to break an impasse – have been especially complex in their results. But the upshot is that until now it has been impossible to form a coalition.

Yesterday’s election was still another attempt to break that jam. In the meantime, the anti-Netanyahu forces have mounted Lawfare against him, with multiple corruption charges that I’ve already discussed at some length in this previous post.

And yet, to the intense frustration of his enemies, Netanyahu appears to have gained seats in yesterday’s election rather than lost them. But feeding his critics’ hope is that fact that he still hasn’t won enough seats to not have to continue to wheel and deal to form a coalition government:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc of right-wing and religious parties remained on the edge of obtaining a blocking majority in the next Knesset late Tuesday night after the Central Election Committee completed counting 4,156,479 votes from 10,305 of the 10,615 regular polling stations, some 97% of all polling stations.

Among the votes that have already been counted, Netanyahu’s Likud won 36 seats, which together with Shas’s 10, United Torah Judaism’s seven and Yamina’s six would be 59 – two seats short of the 61 MKs needed for a majority.

Absentee ballots from IDF soldiers, prisoners, diplomats and other emissaries were to be counted Tuesday night…

Altogether there are some 400,000 votes that have yet to be counted.

Military votes tend to be on the right, but I have no idea whether there would be enough of them to make a difference.

How can Netanyahu get to a working coalition? Here’s an article about it:

The MKs decided that they would continue to coordinate as one bloc under Netanyahu’s leadership in order to form a right-wing government as soon as possible. They also decided to not rule out adding other parties except the Joint List…

Netanyahu said in his victory speech early Tuesday at Expo Tel Aviv that he would form a nationalist government. He did not rule out adding parties from the Center and Left, but the Likud crowd shouted at him not to form a national unity government with Blue and White…

Netanyahu’s spokesman Yonatan Urich told Army Radio on Tuesday morning that Likud officials had already spoken to four possible defectors from parties to the left of Likud. MKs suspected of being on that list issued denials.

Blue and White is a party that was formed for the express purpose of running against Netanyahu in the 2019 election, and the party’s head, Benny Gantz, is strongly opposed to Netanyahu.

Will Netanyahu succeed this time? Maybe:

It was not immediately clear who they could convince to defect from the opposition. Under Israeli law, Netanyahu will have 28 days to do so or risk the process collapsing, leading to the unappealing possibility of a fourth election later this year…

Regardless, Monday’s result – the best for Likud in all three [recent] elections – was a stunning turnaround for a man two weeks away from the start of a major criminal corruption trial.

Again, for details of the charges in that “major corruption trial” please see this previous post.