Benjamin Netanyahu has barely a day left to complete what looked like a slam-dunk a month ago and now seems almost impossible: assembling a governing coalition of parties that control a majority of the 120 seats in Israel’s parliament. If he doesn’t finish the job by midnight Wednesday (5:00 p.m. Eastern), Israel’s figurehead president Reuven Rivlin, no friend of Netanyahu’s, is required by law to choose someone else for the job.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Netanyahu had signed agreements with three small parties holding a combined 23 seats, the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties and the centrist Likud breakaway Kulanu. Those sealed deals together with his own Likud’s 30 seats given the prime minister a total of 53. He had expected to close deals this week with two more parties holding 14 seats between them, for a comfortable total of 67: Ha-Bayit Ha-Yehudi (Jewish Home) of outgoing economics minister Naftali Bennett and Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) of outgoing foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman.

But Lieberman stunned Israelis late Monday by announcing that he was abandoning Netanyahu and taking his 6 seats into the opposition. That left the prime minister entirely dependent on Bennett, with 8 seats, to reach the bare minimum of 61. And as midnight Tuesday approached, Bennett was nowhere to be found. News reports said he’d “gone underground.”

Read the article “Unexpectedly, Benjamin Netanyahu May Find Himself Not Israel’s Prime Minister” on forward.com.