What kind of prime minister will Benjamin Netanyahu turn out to be when he returns to office?

Even his prospective partners don’t know for sure. Will he be “Bibi with a vengeance”, returning from his short exile in opposition to eviscerate the legal system along with his radical coalition? Or will he be “same old Bibi” and, once he’s secured a majority, shift to the centre as he always has? At 73, Is he even capable of changing?

I heard both answers from prominent members of the far-right list, Religious Zionism, now on track to be the second-largest party in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. Their legal eagle, Simcha Rothman, who authored the party’s wide-ranging legal reform plan, is convinced that “after the way he’s been treated by the anything-but-Bibi crowd, you’ll get a new Netanyahu who won’t care anymore what people say and who will be totally prepared this time around to take an axe to the establishment. The left will miss the old Bibi so much, they’ll regret having pushed him out of power.”

But the real star of the election, Jewish Power leader Itamar Ben-Gvir, who helped lead Religious Zionism to more than double its seats in the new Knesset, is convinced that given half a chance, Netanyahu will turn his back on his new partners.

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich campaign ahead of the 1 November 2022 election (GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)

Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich campaign ahead of the 1 November 2022 election (GIL COHEN-MAGEN/AFP via Getty Images)

As he arrived early on Tuesday morning to vote at a primary school in his hometown settlement of Kiryat Arba, Mr Ben-Gvir said, rather unconvincingly, that, “I have deep love for Netanyahu in my soul but we need to make sure he won’t bring Benny Gantz into his coalition instead of us.

"That’s why if you vote for us you get two for the price of one – a Netanyahu government which is also fully right-wing.”

And at every stop on the trail during election day, that was all Ben-Gvir wanted to talk about – the “danger of Gantz”.

No matter that Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly promised throughout the election to form a coalition with Religious Zionism and make Mr Ben-Gvir a minister. And even if he wanted to do otherwise, Mr Gantz has over and over again insisted that he won’t sit in the same government as Netanyahu, as he did back in 2020. Mr Ben-Gvir doesn’t believe either of them.

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Leader of Israel's Otzma Yehudit far-right party Itamar Ben Gvir addresses supporters at campaign headquarters in Jerusalem (Photo by JALAA MAREY/AFP via Getty Images)

But it’s not just the incoming prime minister who is already being questioned by his partners. The new leader of the opposition is under attack even before he leaves the prime minister’s office.

Barring a surprise upset which will stop Mr Netanyahu from forming a government, Yair Lapid is about to break Naftali Bennett’s inglorious record as the shortest-serving prime minister in Israeli history.

The irony is that he’s losing office just as he’s had the best election result since he founded Yesh Atid in 2012. They are projected to win 24 seats in the next Knesset, just seven less than Likud. But the rest of the outgoing coalition parties have fared badly. Blue and White and New Hope, which merged their lists to form National Unity, won 14 seats in the last election and are now down to 12.

Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu has lost a couple of seats. Labour is down from seven to four, barely scraping over the electoral threshold, which Meretz seems to have failed to cross. Unless it has a higher proportion of the remaining uncounted votes, it will have been wiped out. Only Ra’am seems to have grown, by just one seat.

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Israeli prime minister and centrist leader Yair Lapid casting his ballot in Tel Aviv (Photo by Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

Criticism of Mr Lapid abounds from all parts of the former coalition. He is being accused of not forcing Labour and Meretz to merge their lists, of allowing the Joint List to break up, of running a “rose-garden campaign” and not taking the fight aggressively to Mr Netanyahu.

In other words, they’re accusing him of not being Mr Netanyahu, the man who they so wanted to prevent from returning.

How much to blame is Mr Lapid? He stuck to the campaign strategy prepared for him by his trusted American pollster Mark Melman, who guided him in previous election campaigns all the way to the prime minister’s office. Mr Melman’s polling had the anti-Netanyahu bloc winning 61 seats and predicted that Labour and Meretz were both securely above the electoral threshold of 3.25 per cent.

One Israeli political strategist who has been on American campaigns as well and is an admirer of Mr Melman’s work said in the election’s aftermath that “Mark is one of the best in the business but he knows how to help a single party or candidate to victory. And he did well for Yesh Atid. But ensuring an entire bloc of parties win is a very different business and Netanyahu has been doing that for much longer than anyone else.”

Mr Lapid’s role in building the outgoing coalition was pivotal. He did something that Mr Netanyahu was incapable of when he offered Mr Bennett the first half of the prime minister’s term. But ultimately the tensions between the eight parties of the coalition which brought it down after just one year in power continued into the campaign and were the cause of its defeat. Now, these differences are coming with them to life in opposition.

When the final results are in it is highly likely we will find that in fact more votes were cast for the anti-Netanyahu parties than those supporting him. Mr Netanyahu’s camp won more seats because he has worked over many years to establish a high level of control, coordination and discipline over his partners. He didn’t have that when he was a first-term prime minister and lost in 1999, but he learnt it in the wilderness year.

Mr Lapid has his work cut out for him if he hopes to make a similar comeback of his own one day.

On Wednesday morning, President Isaac Herzog visited a high school in Jerusalem. One of the students reminded him that his father, Israel’s sixth president, Chaim Herzog, had refused after the 1984 election to receive the newly elected MK Rabbi Meir Kahane when the other party representatives came for the customary consultations. Will you treat Rabbi Kahane’s follower, Itamar Ben Gvir, in the same way, the student asked.

The president gave a long and lawyerly answer: “I won’t start a lecture about the difference between one person and another. I think you have to understand the differences between the Kach party and today’s Religious Zionism party, the results of the election, the platforms and the Supreme Court’s decision – the Supreme Court has allowed Ben Gvir to run and [after the 2021 election] he was received already by my predecessor, President Rivlin and Kahane was disqualified by the Supreme Court. So I’d be careful of making total comparisons.” He could have simply said, those were different times and a different Israel.

But then he added, rather cryptically, “nothing escapes my eyes and of course, of course, I expect all the leadership and the elected representatives in Israel act in a spirit of fellowship, equality and respect towards each other.”

Mr Herzog, a former Labour leader and Jewish Agency chairman, is very concerned according to those close to him. He’s one of the few Israeli politicians attuned to the feelings of Jews in the Diaspora and is fully aware of the feelings towards a government with a powerful far-right partner.

As president, his job next week is largely ceremonial – to meet the representatives of all the parties and then confer the mandate to form a government upon the candidate who receives the most endorsements - who will be Mr Netanyahu. The only time a president went beyond that role was back in 1984 when Labour and Likud’s blocs were tied and Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir were cajoled to form a national-unity “rotation” government in which they split the prime minister’s term between them. Chaim Herzog’s son would dearly like to deliver a national unity government as well.

But what can Herzog the Second do when the identity of both the next prime minister and the parties supporting him are known in advance? Probably very little, unless he can find a way of offering Mr Netanyahu something he wants, badly, in return for his agreeing to explore other paths to a coalition. But even if Mr Netanyahu is willing, there is no way. None of the other parties are prepared to serve under an indicted prime minister. That’s the reason we’ve had five elections in four years.

But this isn’t just the second Herzog to serve as president. He was also a senior partner in his father’s law firm, once Israel’s largest. And as president he has one power, the pardon. Perhaps he can offer Mr Netanyahu and the leaders of the centrist parties Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz an offer they can’t refuse?