As the election results arrived, what were people saying? analysis

The final tally has not yet arrived, and it is unclear how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will concoct a coalition. But there are certain messages that emerged loud and clear from the nearly 4.6 million votes cast in Monday's elections – with the votes of soldiers still counting – which gave the right-wing bloc 59 seats, the bloc of center left 54 ​​and at Avigdor Liberman Sept. – The first message voters have sent is that they don't care whether Netanyahu will start his trial in two weeks for corruption, fraud and breach of trust. Well, it's not exactly that they don't care, but rather, they think it can do both – being the Prime Minister and an accused. Whole of Blue and White was centered on the notion that it is unthinkable that someone could serve as Prime Minister while on trial. Party leaders – Benny Gantz, Moshe Ya & # 39; alon, Yair Lapid and Gabi Ashkenazi – shouted from every microphone that it violates all standards of good governance and that it is something that simply cannot be done. Voters thought otherwise. eyes wide open, knowing very well – perhaps too well – what Netanyahu is accused of. And the message they sent is that they don't care: he can still rule. Some will say that he can govern because the law does not stipulate that an accused Prime Minister must resign, only an accused minister. Others will say that he can govern because the case against him was prepared by a lawyer of an overzealous state. Whatever the reason, the beating of Blue and White – who has run almost entirely on this issue – against Netanyahu is a clear message that what Blue and White said was unthinkable is very thinkable for many people. This does not necessarily mean that those who voted for Netanyahu think he is innocent. Rather, they think he can continue to serve as head of government until guilt or innocence is fully proven. The second message sent is that the country, or most of the country, does not believe that Israeli democracy is in danger. It is fair to say that those on the left, the media and academics are not the only ones who want to live in a democracy that works, that is dynamic and that works. The same is true – despite stereotypes and caricatures – of the vast majority of Likud voters. The fact that they voted for Netanyahu shows that, unlike the dictators of the last judgment, they do not believe that Netanyahu constitutes a threat to the democracy of the country. They didn't buy Blue and White's slogan that Netanyahu is the Israeli version of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. granting him retroactive immunity; the second would be a bypass law of the Supreme Court so that the court cannot overturn the retroactive immunity bill. According to this school of thought, the message that voters were sending is that they think Netanyahu deserves immunity. The problem with this argument is that if this were indeed the case and the elections could be interpreted as a referendum on the granting of immunity to Netanyahu, then on January 28, Netanyahu would not have withdrew his request for immunity from the Knesset. asks, opening up for trial? Because he realized that a long battle for immunity in the Knesset would be bad for his campaign, and because some of those votes he had after – and recovered on Monday – could have been lost if he had said shamelessly that that was what he was fighting for. the third message from the elections: life in the country is not as bad as voters say. On March 1, one day before the election, the New York Times published a large article entitled: "Israel", Start-up Nation, "Moaning under constraints of growth and neglect". In it, journalists chronicled many of the country's ills, including overcrowded roads, stuffed trains, poor schools, crowded hospitals, queues for MRIs, brain drain – something we have been hearing about for decades now, even as the population, the number of immigrants and returning Israelis continues to grow. The Times piece could have been a blue and white campaign brochure . Reading this article and listening to the Blue and White and Labor-Gesher-Meretz announcements over the past year often touching on the same questions, one might rightly wonder: if things are going so badly, if the Infrastructure is so fragile, education so poor, health care is so flawed, why are people still voting for Netanyahu, as they did this time too? There are many reasons, one of the main ones being that there is a significant dissonance between how uninformed people are and their real lives. People are not stupid. If things went so badly and everything collapsed – including the country's democracy, its infrastructure and its deterrent capabilities – they would not continue to vote in Likud. Party loyalty is deep, but people also want a better life. One of the main takeaways from elections is that more people believe that with all the problems, their lives are not. not bad, has improved considerably considerably over the past decade, and therefore there is no need for change. Especially when the promising party for change waged a lackluster campaign that did little to convince the public of exactly how it would do things differently.