JERUSALEM – News of the collapse of the Israeli government was barely an hour old, but Benjamin Netanyahu, the opposition leader and former prime minister, had already declared he would return to power.
“My friends and I will form a national government,” Mr Netanyahu said in a video that was hastily posted online Monday evening, before Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had even made a formal resignation speech.
“A government that will take care of you, all citizens of Israel, without exception,” added Mr. Netanyahu.
His claim was premature. Another election — Israel’s fifth in less than four years — won’t be held until the fall and could end without a bloc winning a majority. Parliament also has yet to be dissolved, most likely not until next Monday.
And as a farewell shot to an election campaign, lawmakers could pass a law banning criminal suspects from becoming prime ministers. That could affect Mr Netanyahu, who is in the midst of a years-long corruption trial.
Nevertheless, the possibility of Mr Netanyahu returning to office is now greater than at any time since he left last June.
Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Netanyahu, now has the chance to add to his previous 15 years in power, a tenure in which he shaped contemporary Israeli discourse and priorities more than any other figure. During his earlier periods, he pushed Israeli society to the right, fueled popular distrust of the judiciary and the media, and accelerated Israel’s acceptance in the Middle East while overseeing the collapse of the Israeli regime. Palestinian peace negotiations.
Like supporters of Donald J. Trump, Netanyahu’s base did not abandon him even after he lost power.
According to polls, Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, could easily win more seats than any other in new elections. His wider alliance of right-wing and religious parties, while not having an overall majority, would still be the largest in parliament. And some right-wing lawmakers who refused to reinstate him last year could change their minds in the fall, putting him in control of parliament.
For its supporters, that would herald the return of a strong right-wing rule in Israel after a turbulent year in which the country was ruled by a fragile coalition of eight ideologically incompatible parties — including both Jewish and Arab lawmakers — united only by their opposition to Mr Netanyahu himself.
For his opponents, however, the prospect of his return is worrying. A new Netanyahu government would most likely depend on the support of a far-right party that could demand control of the ministry that oversees the police in return for its loyalty.
Netanyahu’s own party has in the past year undermined the concept of Jewish-Arab partnership, hinting at radical changes in the legal system and sometimes even promising revenge against its political opponents.
Netanyahu himself has denied that he would use a return to government to disrupt his prosecution, implying that he would like to face trial — a trial expected to take several more years — while he runs the country.
But a Likud lawmaker and Netanyahu loyalist, Shlomo Karhi, said earlier this year that he would work to replace the Attorney General, the senior government official who oversees Netanyahu’s prosecution. And another Likud lawmaker and former government minister, David Amsalem, said earlier this month that “anyone who has no intention of changing our sick and biased legal system in the first place has no business in the Likud.”
“Once we break the bones of the left wing, we will explain to them that we know how to run this country a little better,” Mr Amsalem said in a separate radio interview this month.
For Ben Caspit, a Netanyahu biographer, this kind of rhetoric raises concerns about the prospect of a new Netanyahu-led government. “Israeli democracy would be really, really in danger,” said Mr Caspit, a political commentator.
“All he cares about is stopping his trial,” he said.
Some Netanyahu allies dismiss this speech as alarmism.
“Fake predictions,” said Tzachi Hanegbi, an experienced Likud lawmaker and former government minister. “They can’t blame Netanyahu about security or economics,” Hanegbi said. “So what can they talk about?”
Meanwhile, for some leftists and many Palestinians, a new Netanyahu government wouldn’t be much worse than the current one.
Prime Minister Bennett has a unifying demeanor, forming a government alliance with an independent Arab party for the first time in Israeli history. But he agrees with Netanyahu on many fundamental points. A former settler leader, Mr Bennett, opposes a Palestinian state, maintained a blockade of the Gaza Strip and approved the construction of thousands of new settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Ultimately, Mr Bennett said, he decided to overthrow his own government to prevent the collapse of a bipartisan justice system in the West Bank that distinguishes between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. Some liken it to apartheid.
Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian political analyst and former Palestinian minister, said: “The current administration may have been different in certain views and positions, but in practice it was no different at all.”
“They had the same political stance: no to a Palestinian state, no to negotiations,” he said. “And they continued to expand the settlements as fast as they could.”
Understand the collapse of the Israeli government
Current and former governments also took a similar approach to the wider Middle East. Both sought to build new diplomatic ties with Arab countries that had long isolated Israel, and both opposed US-led efforts to lift Iran sanctions if Iranian officials agreed to temper their nuclear enrichment program.
But for many Israelis, there is a clear difference between a right-wing government led by Mr. Netanyahu and the diverse current coalition led by Mr Bennett and his centrist partner, Yair Lapid, who were running during the election campaign.
Despite coming from opposing political camps, Mr Bennett and Mr Lapid built a partnership based on compromise and civility, which supporters saw as a sharp contrast to Likud’s optimistic divisions.
During their speeches on Monday to announce the collapse of the government, the two men showed respect, affection and admiration for each other even as they brought about the end of their joint project. “I really love you,” Mr. Lapid said to Mr. Bennett during an unscripted moment.
In practical terms, their government also got Israel moving again after a period of paralysis under Mr. Netanyahu, who during his last two years in power did not have a large enough parliamentary majority to perform certain basic functions of the government.
Mr Bennett’s government has approved Israel’s first national budget in more than three years; tried to reduce food costs by abolishing tariffs on food imports; began to liberalize the regulation of kosher food; and filled several key vacancies in the higher echelons of the civil service that had been left vacant under Mr Netanyahu.
The Bennett administration presided over one of the quietest periods in Gaza in years, encouraging militants there to limit their rocket fire into southern Israel by offering thousands of new work permits to Gazans.
The administration also improved relations with the Biden administration, while still resisting some government goals, such as the Iran nuclear deal or the reopening of a US consulate in Jerusalem to Palestinians.
Mr Netanyahu is not a shoo-in for the next prime minister, any more than he was in four elections from 2019 to 2021. Each time, he was unable to form a majority coalition with other parties, or failed to deliver on commitments to them when he did.
This new election may be no different, said Prof. Gideon Rahat, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“We’ve been in this film four times and we can get similar results a fifth time,” said Professor Rahat.
Right-wing parties that were previously hesitant to sit in a Netanyahu government can join him this time around, but experience has shown that such partnerships do not end well, he added.
“Netanyahu has a credibility problem,” Professor Rahat said. “He can make 1000 promises, but nobody believes him. Netanyahu isn’t bad at electoral politics, but when it comes to building a coalition, he doesn’t have the credit.”
Reporting contributed by Myra Noveck from Jerusalem and Gabby Sobelman from Rehovot, Israel.
