Having missed a final deadline to agree on a governing coalition, the Israeli Knesset is disbanding. A third round of elections will occur in March of 2020, probably on the 2nd of that month.
The national elections last September resulted in a stalemate, with no party able to assemble a majority parliamentary block and a government. For now, Netanyahu remains a caretaker Prime Minister, as he has been since the first elections of this year on April 9th, 2019.
The last two elections have been held with Netanyahu tentatively indicted on a several corruption charges, pending a final hearing before the Attorney General. That hearing, in early October, sustained all the charges and finalized the indictment. Netanyahu will go to trial, except in the unlikely event that he gets the Knesset to vote for his immunity in the next three weeks.
Netanyahu has managed to keep the Likud loyal to him, for the most part. However, for the first time in years, a challenger for Likud leadership has explicitly come up, in the person of Gideon Saar. Saar, a younger man, is considered a skillful politician, reputedly uncorrupt, and more rigidly right-wing than Netanyahu.
Preliminary polls suggest the center-right Kahol Lavan, the Likud’s main challenger, would be slightly strengthened at Likud’s expense in a new election, and that the center plus left might have a chance of reaching a narrow majority. The poll shows that if Netanyahu is replaced with Saar, the Likud would lose several seats. However, some of its votes would go to the extreme right-wing parties, which otherwise would not reach the threshold for entering the Knesset, paradoxically strengthening the right block overall. With the elections several months away, one can impressionistically say that their results won’t differ buy much form those of the previous two.