Following are the results of Tuesday’s elections in Israel, with 99.3 percent of the vote counted.
The final tally could change once there is a count of votes cast by soldiers, sailors and diplomats serving abroad.
Statisticians say that some 100,000 votes, over 5 percent of all votes cast, were wasted on the 15 parties that failed to win the necessary 1.5 percent of the vote to qualify for a Knesset seat.
Parties represented in the outgoing Knesset that did not make the threshold include Tehiya (3 seats), the New Liberal Party (3), Hatikvah (1), Geulat Yisrael (1) and the Progressive List for Peace (1). The turnout was around 77.5 percent of the electorate, a couple points less than usual.
POLITICAL TUESDAY OUTGOING
PARTY VOTE KNESSET
Labor 45 (38)
Meretz 12 (10)
Likud 32 (38)
Tsomet 7 (2)
Moledet 2 (2)
Shas 7 (5)
National Religious Party 6 (5)
United Torah Front 4 (7)
Hadash Communists 3 (3)
Arab Democratic Party 2 (1)
known as Hadash. Such agreements allow a party to transfer its marginal votes to another party that has passed the minimum threshold.
Hadash, which had four seats in the last Knesset, will likely be reduced to three in the next.
Israeli Arabs who had hoped to wield a balance of power between the Jewish political blocs were disappointed and disenchanted with their own leaders.
In any event, Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin seems able to form a coalition without Hadash or Darousha; and he need not worry that those Arab left-wing parties will make a deal with Likud.
Rabin, in the election campaign, ruled out a coalition with “extremist” elements of either left or right, which appears to exclude the Arab parties from a Labor-led government. But Darousha, who once belonged to the Labor Party, said Wednesday that he didn’t rule out re-joining it.
Palestinian leaders meanwhile expressed hope that the Labor victory would accelerate the peace process.
Hanan Ashrawi, spokeswoman for the Palestinian delegation negotiating with Israel, expressed satisfaction with Labor’s win but reserved judgment as to whether a Labor-led regime would advance the talks.
Another Palestinian leader, Hanna Seniora, called the outcome “a turning point,” according to the East Jerusalem daily Al-Fajr.
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