The recent Israeli elections were largely seen as a referendum on Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu; did voters want to keep the country on the same conservative path it had carved since Netanyahu entered office as Prime Minister for the second time in 2009, or were they fed up?

Leading up to the elections, the latter option seemed likely. Pre-election polls indicated that Netanyahu’s challenger, leader of the center-left Zionist Union Party Isaac Herzog, would receive as many as four more seats in the Knesset than Netanyahu, in which case Herzog would have had the opportunity to take the Prime Minister’s office from Netanyahu.

Of course, those pre-election polls proved to be grossly inaccurate, as Netanyahu went on to win a decisive 30 seats. Far from moving the country leftward as his liberal challengers hoped, the recent elections will almost certainly allow Netanyahu to form the more conservative coalition that he hoped for when he called for the new elections last December. If Kulanu, a new party focused on economic issues led by former Likud Minister Moshe Kahlon, decides to join Netanyahu’s government, Likud will be able to form a fairly comfortable coalition without any of his more liberal rivals, such as Yair Lapid, Tzipi Livni and Herzog.

Netanyahu’s largest weakness in the elections was widely considered to be his domestic economic policy. In recent years, inequality has increased significantly in Israel and the middle class has struggled to keep up with a rising cost of living. These economic frustrations led many Israelis to the streets in the summer of 2011 in Occupy Wall Street type protests that, among other things, demanded lower cottage cheese prices. In a development that disturbed many older Jews, many young Israelis began moving to Berlin, a city that has become a hip and thriving cultural center where everyday living expenses are significantly cheaper than in, say, Tel Aviv. As a response to these concerns, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party, which focused on alleviating the burden of the secular middle class, won 19 seats in the 2012 elections.

In the meantime, many Israelis saw Netanyahu as out of touch with the struggle of the middle class. Reports revealed that Netanyahu had an annual budget of $2,700 for ice cream (he favors pistachio) and spent a whopping $24,000 on take out this past year. Wisely, Herzog and his Zionist Union party attempted to focus the election as much as possible on these economic issues.

But Netanyahu, by nearly all accounts a masterful politician, played a similar game. Many are of the opinion that a major goal of Netanyahu’s controversial speech to Congress about Iran was to focus the elections around national security issues, a realm in which many conservatives view Herzog as weak. As the election became closer and closer and polls revealed Likud to be trailing Herzog’s Zionist Union, Netanyahu mounted a frantic campaign to convince more conservative voters, who were more closely aligned with the religious nationalist Jewish Home party, to vote for him instead. This rightward political maneuver was especially conspicuous in his last second reversal of support for a Palestinian state (which he recently re-reversed). And it worked. Netanyahu’s unexpected last second votes likely came from many of these members of the religious right who preferred the Jewish Home but, above all, could not tolerate the idea of Herzog being in charge, lest Herzog’s foreign policy allow Islamic terrorists to conquer Israel, as some of Netanyahu’s campaign ads suggested.

In a different Likud commercial, Netanyahu unexpectedly shows up at a couple’s apartment as their babysitter or, in his words, “bibi sitter.” The couple is confused at the prospect that the Prime Minister will be their babysitter, but Netanyahu responds that it’s either him or Herzog. To the couple, the decision was clear. Apartments may be expensive, but more than anything, Israeli voters want someone to guard over their kids.