Itongadol.- Israel’s Knesset is gearing up for the election Tuesday of the country’s tenth president, who will succeed Shimon Peres on July 27. The country’s 120 parliamentarians are the only ones permitted to vote in the election – though only 119 will actually do so, as MK Meir Porush (United Torah Judaism) decided to avoid the vote altogether and traveled to the United States this week.
That means that 60 votes are required to win in the first round, which will begin Tuesday at 11 a.m. in the plenum. If no candidate wins 60 votes, the two leading candidates will go to a second round, which will take place about 30 minutes after the initial round’s votes are counted. All told, by Tuesday afternoon, Israel will have a new president-elect.
There are five candidates left in the race after a month-long, scandal-ridden campaign that saw two other contenders, Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom (Likud) and MK Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor), drop out. The remaining candidates are, in order of the public support they have already garnered from MKs: Likud MK Reuven Rivlin (31 MKs have publicly declared their support), former Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner (14 MKs), Hatnua MK Meir Sheetrit (11 MKs), former Knesset speaker Dalia Itzik (10 MKs), and Nobel laureate chemist Dan Shechtman (5 MKs).
Based on the public declarations, Rivlin would seem a clear shoo-in. Indeed, a systematic count of MKs likely to vote for him, including Likud supporters who have yet to declare their support and others, suggests he may have as many as 50 votes in the first round. And with the other candidates splitting the remaining votes among themselves, Rivlin stands some chance, though not a good one, of winning in the first round.
Assuming Rivlin fails to obtain the 60 required votes in the first round, he will go to the second round, and the big question will be which other candidate will join him.
If one counts the public declarations of support, former justice Dorner would seem the most likely to advance, but this is almost certainly a mirage created by Knesset coalition politics. Dorner’s public supporters, as seen in a helpful tally (Hebrew) of public declarations of support by the political blog of analyst Tal Schneider, consist largely of left-wing MKs who, while vocal, do not represent the prevailing winds in the Knesset.