Israel Votes in Election Likely to Retain Netanyahu

At a polling station in the leafy Abu Tor neighborhood of Jerusalem, a steady stream of voters arrived in the morning to cast their ballots. Many said they were glad to be fulfilling their civic right and duty but that the election held little excitement or much prospect of change.

“The feeling is that what was is what will be,” said Yossi, 37, an engineer who said he had voted for the leftist Meretz Party, and who asked to withhold his family name for reasons of privacy.

Noting the lack of enthusiasm, Zelig Segal, 79, an artist and another Meretz supporter from the neighborhood, which straddles the predominantly Jewish western side of the city and the contested, Israeli-annexed eastern side, where thePalestinian [4] leadership wants to establish the capital of an independent state, said it was still important to vote.

“We live here, not in Switzerland,” Mr. Segal said. “We are not here alone.”

Polls in recent weeks have consistently predicted a victory for Mr. Netanyahu’s ticket, a combination of his conservative Likud Party and the ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu. But the polls have also shown the joint ticket declining in strength, from the 42 seats it holds in the current Parliament to perhaps 32 or 35, and losing support to the Jewish Home, a party further to the right that has been revitalized and energized under the leadership of Naftali Bennett, a charismatic first-time candidate.

Mr. Netanyahu, after casting his vote, went to the Western Wall, a Jewish holy site in the Old City of Jerusalem, and said, “I pray today for the future of Israel [5], for the sake of our people, I believe in this and I am certain that Israel’s citizens will do all within their power to give strength to the people of Israel in its land and country.”

Outside a polling station in south Jerusalem, Lisa Barkan, 51, who runs a nongovernmental organization that helps new immigrants, said she had voted for Likud “because I believe in a strong economy.”

“That’s what keeps the state strong, gives people jobs, makes people happy to get up in the morning, because they know they can feed their families, and allows us to absorb immigrants,” she said. “Peace will come when it is ready, no matter what party is in power.”

But hours before the ballots opened, some longtime Likud supporters expressed their frustration with the departing Netanyahu government, saying it had not offered a clear path forward for Israel. One said he would still be voting for Likud in the same way that he remained loyal to his soccer team. Another said he would not support Likud this time but was still undecided about whom to vote for instead.

The parties of the divided center and left failed to forge a united bloc that might have presented a realistic challenge to the current leadership. The Labor Party, projected to win fewer than 20 seats, has said that if it does not win enough support to lead the new government, it will sit in the opposition.

As usual in Israel, where more than 30 parties were competing in a system based on nationwide proportional representation, no single party was expected to win enough seats for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. If the polls were anywhere close to accurate, a weakened Mr. Netanyahu was likely to face the choice of forming a narrow rightist and religious coalition or a broader one including one or more centrist parties — an option that could subject the prime minister to pressures from either side and lead to instability or paralysis.

“The sense is that there may be another election a year and a half from now,” said another Abu Tor voter, Ruthi Ginsburg, 78.

Critical issues on Israel’s agenda, like the peace process with the Palestinians and the question of how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program [6], figured superficially, if at all, in an election campaign that focused mostly on domestic issues, with parties on both the left and right pledging to bring down housing prices, a primary demand of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who joined the social justice street protests in 2011.

“The campaign did not require people to choose between alternative ideas on important issues. It was all about images and personalities,” said Dan Caspi, a professor in the department of communications at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. This election, Mr. Caspi said, would leave “everything open,” with the policies of the future government dependent on how the coalition shapes up and on the involvement of international powers.