WASHINGTON—On Tuesday, Israelis will head to the polls to cast their ballots for members of the 120-seat Knesset for the first time since the most far-right government in Israel’s history came to power in December 2022. But the election may leave neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his opponents with a clear path to forming a government, leading to prolonged coalition negotiations and potentially repeat elections.
Most recent polls predict that Netanyahu’s bloc will fall short of the requisite sixty-one seats to form a governing coalition, but the opposition’s ability to do so is far from guaranteed. Coalition politics are inherent to Israeli legislative elections: No single party has ever won an outright majority in the Knesset. But this time, unless opposition parties vastly outperform projections, their path to unseating Netanyahu will rely on Arab parties’ participation, as was the case in 2021, when Ra’am became the first Arab party to join a governing coalition and helped to bring Naftali Bennett, and later Yair Lapid, to power.
The uncertainty comes after a turbulent four years under Netanyahu. His coalition is the first to survive a full four-year term in nearly four decades, and it has governed through a series of tumultuous events: an attempted overhaul of the judicial system that sparked millions-strong protests against the proposed changes through much of 2023; the October 7, 2023 Hamas terrorist attack and hostage crisis; the ensuing war in Gaza, and later, Lebanon; and Israel’s first direct military engagements with Iran, including the ongoing war fought alongside the United States.
Most Israelis agree that this election is critical to charting the country’s future, with some going as far as to call it existential. Yet the campaign has been oddly muted, conducted largely online and in television studios, and public opinion polling has consistently shown a deadlocked electorate, with two roughly equal blocs of coalition and opposition supporters. For months, there has been scant evidence of voters crossing from one bloc to the other, with most movement between parties on the same side of the divide.
The mechanics
With an exception for official Israeli representatives serving abroad, all Israelis must vote in person on Tuesday. Approximately 500,000 Israelis live overseas, and many have chosen to fly back to Israel to cast their votes in this consequential election.
Each Israeli voter is eligible to cast one ballot for a single party, and any of the thirty-seven parties that receives at least 3.25 percent of votes cast will have a proportional number of the 120 seats in the Knesset. Parties’ candidate lists were submitted by September 8, presenting voters with the politicians who would serve depending on that party’s vote share. The electoral threshold makes accurate predictions of ultimate seat totals particularly fickle: whether parties teetering near 3.25 percent ultimately surpass the threshold and net the minimum of four seats can dramatically shift the seat totals and, accordingly, possible coalitions. As small parties also pull votes from others and risk squandering those votes if the threshold is not reached, their leaders might choose to withdraw from the race to ensure some of their supporters’ votes support aligned parties that are not at risk of falling below 3.25 percent, as Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party did with less than two weeks to go. And if they don’t reach this conclusion on their own, leaders of larger parties often attempt to convince them to do so: Netanyahu has publicly called on Ofer Winter, leader of the new far-right Amcha Yisrael party, to withdraw in hopes of avoiding the potential loss of tens of thousands of reliably right-wing voters.
Once all votes have been tallied, the Israeli president (currently Isaac Herzog, who is not on the ballot, with two years remaining on his seven-year term as Israel’s head of state) receives recommendations from party leaders and then selects the candidate he deems most capable of forming a government, and that candidate has twenty-eight days (with the possibility of a fourteen-day extension) to do so. Should that candidate fail to assemble a governing coalition, the president has three days to select a second candidate, who also has twenty-eight days, with no possibility of extension. If the second candidate also fails, the current Knesset can petition the president to task another member with forming the government. But if the Knesset opts not to do so, the country heads to new elections, and the entire process is repeated, with Netanyahu remaining in power as a caretaker prime minister, with somewhat circumscribed powers.
Two unusual possibilities loom in the aftermath of the vote. In one, if the opposition bloc gains seats in the mid-fifties, they could seek to form a minority government—one that has less than sixty-one seats, but passive support from outside by Arab parties. In the other, if parties opposed to the current coalition have over sixty-one seats in the Knesset, they could vote in a new Knesset speaker and seek to seize control of the Knesset legislative agenda even before a government is formed. Such a move might be challenged by Netanyahu’s party and would likely require the intervention of the Supreme Court.
The ballot
Netanyahu, already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is attempting to win his seventh election since he first became Israel’s head of government in 1996. He has served for nineteen years as Israel’s premier and is as polarizing an electoral issue as any policy debate. Despite long proclaiming himself as “Mr. Security,” Netanyahu was at the helm during the deadliest attack on Israel in the state’s history, and his critics blame him for a strategy that attempted to manage Hamas’s presence in Gaza, yet failed to anticipate and protect against the terrorist group’s deadly incursion on October 7. His supporters deflect blame from him to other security officials, and they point to Israel’s achievements in the war that followed, including significant weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah, and strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
On October 18, in the first-ever public endorsement of an Israeli candidate by an American president, Donald Trump endorsed Netanyahu, calling him a “Great Warrior Prime Minister” and “even greater Partner for Peace in combatting the Islamic Republic of Iran.” A year ago, Trump’s popularity among Israelis soared following the October 2025 Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release agreement, which his administration helped broker and which secured the return of the remaining hostages in Gaza. However, by July, following the US-Iran ceasefire and memorandum of understanding that temporarily halted the war, less than a third of Israelis believed that Israel’s security was a “central consideration” for the American president, and his endorsement’s power to move the needle in Netanyahu’s favor is likely to be relatively insignificant, with polls holding steady.
Gadi Eisenkot, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is Netanyahu’s most formidable challenger. He boasts serious security credentials and knows firsthand the costs of the last three years of war, having lost his son in the war in Gaza in December 2023. Recent polling has put Eisenkot’s Yashar party between twenty and twenty-four seats, slightly ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud party, which polls between eighteen and twenty-one seats.
Former prime ministers Bennett and Lapid have again joined forces, seeking to revive their winning (albeit transient) 2021 partnership that unseated Netanyahu. Their B’Yachad (“Together”) party, led by Bennett, is staunchly in favor of mandatory IDF service for ultra-Orthodox Israelis, breaking up monopolies, and the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into the October 7 attacks. Lapid entered politics in 2012 after a career in journalism; Bennett’s first foray into politics was as Netanyahu’s chief of staff, and he would go on to serve as Netanyahu’s minister of economy and religious services, diaspora affairs, education, and defense.
Avigdor Lieberman, another former minister of defense under Netanyahu who now opposes him, leads the Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel Our Home”) party and has been a secular, hawkish figure in Israeli politics for nearly three decades. The field also includes several other leaders who will shape any coalition math: Aryeh Deri, whose Shas party dominates the Sephardic Haredi vote; Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister who heads the far-right Otzma Yehudit; Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister who heads the ardently pro-West Bank settlement Religious Zionism party; Mansour Abbas, whose Ra’am Arab party could again be pivotal if neither bloc reaches sixty-one; Yair Golan, a former deputy IDF chief of staff who now leads the left-wing Democrats; and Yoaz Hendel, a former communications minister under Netanyahu who leads the Reservists Party.
The stakes
The uncertainty over who will govern comes at a moment when Israel faces fundamental, interconnected questions about its identity as a Jewish and democratic state, its security, its relationships in the region (including with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza), its standing in the international community, and its relationship with the United States, both during the final two years of Trump’s term in office and with his successor.
According to polling by the Israel Democracy Institute, Jewish Israelis overwhelmingly rank a party’s position on foreign affairs and security and a party’s position on the economy and the cost of living as the two most potent factors impacting their decision on election day. These are followed by a party’s position on military conscription and its position on issues of religion and state. While the thirty-seventh government’s early months were dominated by millions of Israelis protesting proposed judicial “reforms” intended to weaken the judiciary, only 18 percent of Israelis today rank reform to the judicial system as important to their decision on election day.
Beyond these broad categories, a small number of discrete issues are top of mind for Israelis as the election approaches, chief among them the October 7 attacks. Wrapped up in the lasting impact of those attacks are questions of the political leadership’s culpability and accountability, Israel’s defense posture, the future of the Palestinian question, and impacts on Israel’s economy, national psyche, and social fabric. The issue of Ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service is also a particularly animating campaign issue, especially considering the wildly disproportionate burden that post–October 7 conflicts placed on reservists (both secular and religious but non-Ultra-Orthodox). And, echoing the concerns of American voters who will cast their own ballots a week after the Israeli elections, the high cost of living looms large. Prices in Israel are significantly higher than in many other advanced economies, and they have soared 20 percent since Netanyahu returned to power in 2022.