Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can reasonably contemplate another term in office, albeit with a fractious coalition, having dragged himself from the jaws of defeat in the final days of a difficult campaign.

With the arithmetic still fluctuating in the early hours of the vote count late Tuesday and early Wednesday, there were coalition constellations that could have deprived him of another stint as prime minister, though they required extremely implausible alliances of ideologically disparate parties. By dawn Wednesday, however, the TV exit polls had been discredited, Netanyahu had clearly scored a decisive victory, and it was near-certain that the next coalition will be led by Netanyahu and Likud and comprised of right-wing and Orthodox parties. That represents a remarkable turnaround. A victory “against all odds,” as he called it in his victory speech.

Opinion surveys last week showed Netanyahu’s Likud trailing Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union by four seats, with the momentum running firmly in Herzog’s favor. Long Israel’s peerless political operator, Netanyahu reversed that momentum, while Herzog failed to put up a sufficiently effective fight.

In the cause of his re-election — fighting what his delighted Likud ally Yuval Steinitz late Tuesday called “the entire world and its wife” — Netanyahu shifted drastically away from traditional strategy. Rather than seeking to bolster his share of the vote by reaching out to the center of the electorate, the Likud leader turned inward. He directed his appeals over the final few days of the campaign to the Israeli right, to his home territory.

He didn’t quite say, “Don’t vote for the Jewish Home or Yisrael Beytenu,” his natural right-wing allies, led by two men — Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman — who used to work for him. He most emphatically did say, over and over and over, that Israelis who want him as prime minister simply had to vote Likud: “Those who support the national camp have to understand that in the days that are left they have to rally around me and the Likud,” Netanyahu told The Times of Israel in an interview on Friday. They have to “vote for my party, to prevent the left from taking over Israel…. Vote for my party, Likud.”

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.