If the final polls on the Israeli election are to be believed—by law, there will be no more revealed before the voting begins, on Tuesday morning—things are looking better for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party than for Blue and White, the new centrist party led by the former military Chief of Staff Benny Gantz. The two continue to run neck and neck in the race for a plurality in the Knesset—with about thirty seats each, out of a total of a hundred and twenty. But both are running with a bloc of smaller parties, and Netanyahu’s bloc seems more likely than Gantz’s to win a sixty-one-seat Knesset majority.

The President typically bestows a mandate to form a government on the leader of the party that wins a plurality—except in cases where a bloc of parties led by someone else wins a clear majority. That is how Netanyahu won in 2009, and it’s why the polls still favor him. A majority of voters are now either hoping that he will remain in office, or are bracing for it. In a recent Channel 12 poll, fifty-eight per cent of respondents said that Netanyahu will be the next Prime Minister. But only thirty-six per cent wanted him to be.

Given the quirks of the Israeli electoral system, though, the polls may prove misleading. The margin of error is around four per cent, which means that it may be impossible to divine the fates of the all-important smaller parties. Each must win three and a quarter per cent of the total vote in order to enter the Knesset; a vote for a party that does not clear that threshold is simply wasted. Fully seven parties—two in Gantz’s potential bloc, five in Netanyahu’s—have been polling close to extinction at various points in the campaign. Moreover, according to an April 2nd poll, more than eight per cent of voters are still undecided.

So Gantz’s bloc could squeak out a win. Or Netanyahu’s could win in a landslide. Or either leader could win a plurality for his party, but not a majority for his bloc. In fact, the polls reveal little about the serious difficulties that either of them, even with a clear win, will face in forming a government. Consider the head-spinning possibilities:

Gantz wins outright—and his problems begin. For Blue and White to win a plurality, a significant number of secular, formerly right-of-center voters will have to support it. So will a significant number of young first-time voters. This is a tall order: to most Israelis, the business sector seems strong, as does the deterrence of enemies, and Netanyahu gets credit for both. So even young Israelis tend to skew right. A poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute shows that among Israelis aged sixty-five and older, Gantz beats Netanyahu fifty-three per cent to thirty-five; among voters aged eighteen to twenty-four, Netanyahu beats Gantz sixty-five per cent to seventeen.

Gantz and his allies have been courting these secular, security-minded voters, promising to provide a hard line on security—three of the four senior leaders of Blue and White are former generals—and that he will form a government only with Zionist (read: non-Arab) parties. He is also stressing the importance of the rule of law, warning of Netanyahu’s alliance with messianists and proto-fascist followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane—of the danger that Netanyahu is turning Israel into an authoritarian theocracy, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has done in Turkey—and promising to force ultra-Orthodox Haredi schools, which focus on religious studies, to also teach such basic subjects as math and English. He is presenting himself as a return to an eclipsed, progressive Israeliness.

Blue and White’s winning a majority bloc is another matter, however. For that, it will have to hold its own without luring (even more) voters away from Zionist allies in its block—the Labor Party and the left-wing Meretz Party—who will have to perform at least as well if not better than expected. More important, Gantz will need the Arab vote to be substantially higher than it has been, both to elect more Arab Knesset members—who would block Netanyahu’s rightists—and to raise the electoral threshold, thus sinking marginal rightist parties. But the polls anticipate a decline in the Arab vote, putting one Arab party at risk of dropping below the Knesset threshold.

So Gantz would be trapped. He’d need support from secular-left and Arab parties to get the Presidential mandate. He’d then have forty-five days to form a government. But, to form a government only with Zionists, he’d need not only Labor and Meretz but also some combination of rightist parties, including some of the ultra-Orthodox and rightist zealots whom he’s been running against.

According to Haaretz, Gantz has hinted which of those parties he’d court. He’s reportedly planning to approach United Torah Judaism, a veteran Haredi party that is traditionally hostile to secular Zionism, but never mind; the Haredim have schools and rabbinic sinecures to protect, and would therefore, at least notionally, be willing to join any government. Gantz is also courting two small parties that grew out of the Likud. First, there is the populist Kulanu (“All Together”), which appeals primarily to Mizrahi Jews, of Middle Eastern descent, who do not see returning to an older Israel, run by descendants of European pioneers, as a plus; Kulanu’s leader, Moshe Kahlon, is currently the finance minister. Then there is Zehut (“Identity”), which espouses a strange mix of libertarian rhetoric—chiefly, in support of the legalization of weed—and a mystical religious attachment to the settlement movement and to the goal of building a Third Temple on the Temple Mount. Any of these parties might be willing to join a coalition in exchange for being awarded key ministries, which would likely upset promises made to the leftist parties.

Gantz seems to be counting on eating his Zionist cake while depending on those who would not have it. (One Arab party, Hadash-Taal, has already announced that it will support him.) If the rightist parties decide not to join him, he would have to form a minority government with Labor and Meretz, with the Arab members of Knesset provisionally voting with them from the back benches. (This was the arrangement that Yitzhak Rabin lived with during the Oslo process, before he was assassinated by a rightist zealot.) Gantz’s senior ally at the head of Blue and White, Yair Lapid, has dismissed this prospect out of hand. But the party may have no other choice, except to find some kind accommodation with the Likud, about which more presently.

Netanyahu wins outright—and saves himself. Netanyahu is facing indictments. The fact that his bloc is still in the lead is a tribute to his campaign—and to his desperation. He seems to have grasped that swing voters have been looking not for sophisticated policy initiatives or democratic scruples but toughness. Opponents with a comparatively stronger military background, particularly Blue and White’s generals, could have been a problem; so Netanyahu’s campaign has used social media, aided by timely leaks, to warp Gantz’s record, depicting him as indecisive, weak, possibly compromised by a hacked phone—and, in any case, beholden to Arab voters. (An Israeli watchdog group has uncovered a network of hundreds of social-media accounts, many of them fake, used to smear Netanyahu’s opponents.)