Israel election: Benjamin Netanyahu may be on his way out

Tel Aviv: In 1996, a canny and polished politician named Benjamin Netanyahu stormed onto the electoral scene and became Israel's youngest prime minister. An articulate and commanding presence, fluent in English, twice wounded in combat, he became a political force of nature, never far from the spotlight – or the minds of his rivals – even during the few years when he was out of power.
Now, however, voters may finally be turning away from the 65-year-old leader. Trailing in the polls as he heads into Tuesday's general elections, the Prime Minister has acknowledged he is in danger of being dislodged, though the famously mercurial Israeli electorate may yet make a last-minute swerve, and the vagaries of Israel's complicated political system are likely to cloud the outcome.
Candidates crisscrossed the country on Sunday, making impassioned eleventh-hour appeals in what has turned into one of the hardest-fought campaigns in modern Israeli history. For Mr Netanyahu's main competition, a centre-left party known as the Zionist Union, the message was simple: It's time for the Prime Minister to go.

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"The public has had enough of Netanyahu," said Isaac Herzog, the soft-spoken and scholarly lawyer-politician who morphed into the driven candidate now seen as the likeliest contender to lead the country if Mr Netanyahu's Likud Party falls short. "The public wants change."
Polls appeared to bear him out. In the last surveys released before a "poll blackout" took effect at the end of last week, nearly three-quarters of the respondents said the country needed a change of course.
But if the country's longest-serving prime minister since founding father David Ben-Gurion is on his way out, he is definitely not going without a fight. In a series of sharply combative interviews, Mr Netanyahu depicted his rivals – Mr Herzog and running mate Tzipi Livni, a former foreign affairs minister and peace negotiator –as weak and naive, asserting they would make extraordinary concessions to Palestinians and fail to safeguard Israel against a nuclear Iran.
"Buji and Tzipi will run straight to Ramallah," the Prime Minister thundered in an interview on Sunday on Israel Radio, calling Mr Herzog by his widely used nickname as he referred to the West Bank city that is the Palestinian Authority's home base. "They will capitulate immediately ... They cannot withstand international pressure, and don't want to."
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Although the final burst of electioneering has taken on the tenor of high drama, commentators of all political stripes were nearly unanimous in their assessment that the vote is unlikely to result in a decisive victory for either side, because of Israel's intricately wrought system of coalition governance.
The Zionist Union and Likud are the two largest among 26 political parties contesting the election, and it is virtually impossible for either one to achieve a majority in the 120-seat parliament, or Knesset. They must woo coalition partners, a process that can at times resemble a delicate minuet and at others a barroom brawl, and which can take weeks to yield a result.
It is usually the leader of the biggest vote-getting party who heads the government, but not always. In 2013, Ms Livni's Kadima party bested Mr Netanyahu's by a single seat, but she was unable to muster enough support for a workable coalition. Mr Netanyahu was.
If the Zionist Union wins this election, she and Mr Herzog have agreed to rotate the prime minister's post.
Rivals can end up teaming up to form a "unity government" – which tends to struggle under the weight of internal contradictions – but Mr Netanyahu has said he would not enter into such an arrangement, and the Zionist Union, having made calls for his ouster a centrepiece of its election platform, might find it awkward to then court him.
Mr Netanyahu's seemingly flustered demeanour in the campaign's waning days was a far cry from three short months ago, when he summarily fired cabinet ministers he deemed insubordinate, in effect dissolving his coalition and precipitating elections, which are being held two years ahead of schedule. At the time, the Prime Minister's camp appeared confident he would win a mandate that would allow him to form a more conservative coalition without the presence of overt opponents in his government.
In hindsight, some observers said, that appears to have been a potentially fatal political miscalculation, a gamble founded both on hubris and a serious underestimation of popular discontent. A key early indicator of growing public restiveness was a grass-roots social-issues campaign that sprang up in 2011, galvanising nationwide demonstrations over the high cost of living and unleashing new political forces.
Soaring housing costs, in particular, became a prominent issue in this campaign, but Mr Netanyahu infuriated many voters by appearing to brush off their concerns in favour of a relentless focus on the Iranian nuclear threat.
Voters turning their backs on Mr Netanyahu and the Likud are likelier to migrate to centrist or right-leaning parties rather than the Zionist Union. One such party, the centrist Kulanu, is forecast to be a kingmaker in coalition negotiations, but has not said which bloc it would support.