Credit:  Dan Balilty / AP

By Faith Karimi, Greg Botelho and Oren Liebermann, CNN

Jerusalem (CNN) Benjamin Netanyahu appears poised to keep his job as Israel's Prime Minister, declaring victory Wednesday following a bitter campaign punctuated by his last-minute appeals to right-wing voters.

For weeks, Netanyahu's Likud party trailed in opinion polls to the Zionist Union alliance that characterized him as a divisive leader not up to the task of making the lives of ordinary Israelis better.

Those polls turned out to be wrong.

Instead, the Likud party grabbed at least 29 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, according to unofficial numbers from the Israeli election committee, based on 99% of the vote. Its leaders will have the first chance at forming a coalition government.

The Zionist Union came in second, with at least 24 seats.