--- title: "Israel's Elections are So Much More Complicated Than You Think. Here's Why" description: "Israel heads to the polls with no clear winner in sight. Netanyahu's Likud needs coalition partners including hardline nationalists and Haredi parties, whilst opposition leaders Eisenkot and Bennett remain hawkish despite opposing Bibi. With neither bloc reaching sixty-one seats, complex negotiations loom, potentially leaving Netanyahu as caretaker regardless of results." url: https://fronts.co/videos/israels-elections-are-so-much-more-complicated-than-you-think-heres-why.md canonical: https://fronts.co/videos/israels-elections-are-so-much-more-complicated-than-you-think-heres-why/ datePublished: 2026-10-28T15:30:23.000Z dateModified: 2026-10-28T15:30:23.000Z author: - name: Fronts Staff url: https://fronts.co/authors/fronts-team/ publisher: Fronts type: NewsArticle language: en access: members isAccessibleForFree: false tokens: 4933 --- Earlier this month, Polymarket posted on X that one of the Israeli opposition parties had accused sitting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of being pro-Palestine. And this was no joke. The attacker at was real. Aside from the fact that Netanyahu is obviously not pro-Palestine, the whole thing points to a bigger issue. Many outside Israel do not really understand just how wild the country's political system is. The used to two party systems, many in America and the UK, assumed that if Netanyahu is hawkish, then naturally the people who are running against him must be more restrained. Well, Israeli politics have a way of taking a flamethrower to assumptions like that. Many of the parties that are most anti-netanyahu are quite hawkish themselves, while the parties that are holding up Netanyahu's government are comparatively indifferent to all the wars going on in the region. And just today from when Israelis go to the polls to vote in the first national election since the October 7th massacre, nobody seems to have a clear path to the prem iership. So today we ask, who are all these guys and what are they running on? And pity us as we try to explain it all in a sub-20 minute video. Before we get started on our journey through modern Israeli politics, we want to clarify a few terms. When you look at politics in any given country, you can generally understand parties as running from left to right, with some cukes at the far edges of both. Well is, however, not like other countries. There is technically a left, and we'll get to it in a moment, but nearly all of the political scene is occupied by various types of right-wing parties that have various different ideas on how to run a country. Here, right versus left doesn't really do much for us. To make sense of all of the very modest 37 separate parties running, it helps to think of the election as three loose camps. There's Netanyahu in the parties willing to keep him in power. The Zionist opposition parties that are doing their best to get rid of him, and then a third group made up of non-aligned parties and Arab parties. All of these will be competing for a total of 120 seats in Israel's parliament called the Knesset. They need 61 to form a government. Neither of the two main groups is close to that threshold, which is why this is so complicated. If you're already feeling lost, do not worry, this is Israel's sixth trip to the polls since 2019, so they are almost as lost as you are. And even if you don't really follow Israeli news, chances are that the one party you will have heard of is longtime Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party, Likud, which has dominated Israeli politics for decades. And unlike some of the other parties that we'll look at today, its support is pretty broad-based. While it does particularly well among observant Jews, as well as working class and middle-class voters outside of Israel's wealthy or big cities, it also attracts plenty of secular Israelis, many of whom have been drawn by Bibi's staunch nationalism and emphasis on security. That focus has long been Bibi's main selling point. But in the final days before the vote, he's escalated it to previously unseen levels. On Sunday, he shared an AI-generated image of Tel Aviv getting nuked by an Iranian missile, warning that electing the wrong person could risk exposing Israelis to a second holocaust. And as if that wasn't enough, a massive scandal broke over the weekend that Netanyahu had pushed for military action that could spark another confrontation with Iran. IDF Chief I al-Zamir, who was concerned about any politicization of the military, reportedly told him to pound sand. Strykes did not materialize, after all, and Netanyahu denies the report. But since leaking, it's become quite the scandal. Opposition figure Avigdor Lieberman has formally requested an outright treason investigation into Netanyahu for it, which isn't exactly the headline we imagine Bibi was looking for. For Bibi and his party, an outright majority is simply not going to happen. He could is currently polling at around 20 seats, meaning he'll need just about everyone already in his coalition to have a good election night as well. And those allies fall into two very different camps. The Hard Nine Nationalists, who want Israel to go even harder at its enemies in the region, and the so-called ultra-orthodox or "harrady" parties, whose primary concern is protecting their community from what they see as negative influence from the state. Two of the most prominent of these are Bezalel Smotrich's religious Zionism, and Itamar Ben-Gavir's Jewish Power Party. Both of them take the hardest line imaginable on a whole host of issues, with Ben-Gavir also competing with Donald Trump for the prize of "saying the most wild you've ever heard in your entire life." But while they can be pretty hard to tell apart from abroad, they tend to appeal to different electorates back in Israel. Smotrich's base skews heavily religious, hence the "religious Zionist name," while Ben-Gavir is developed a more populist brand that includes some religious Israelis, but also lots of secular ones, too. The two actually ran together on a joint electoral list in Israel's last election, which is essentially when smaller parties agreed to form mini-coelitions before the vote helped the net pass the 3.25% threshold needed to get into the Knesset. Get fewer votes than that, and a party has no seats at all. CB was originally trying to get both of them to stick together for this election, too. But the trouble is that Ben-Gavir has considerably grown his appeal since last time. Jewish Power is now polling around eight seats on its own, has started to see Smotrich as a deadweight, and has decided it has outgrown the electoral pact. Smotrich, meanwhile, finds himself in danger of falling below the atoral threshold altogether, though he appears to have brought himself some hope by teaming up with yet another party. This time around, it's with Zahut, which is perhaps best known for campaigning on legalizing weed back in 2019, so yes, the religious nationalist finance minister is now sharing a ballot with the stoner libertarian, guys. At this point, all we can say is welcome to Israeli politics. On the Haredi front, BB's also feeling the heat. The Haredi community is primarily represented by Shahs and United Torah Judaism, or UTJ, which together are estimated to win about 15 seats. While they're willing to join a future Netanyahu government, along as their preferred issues are met, they've also left open the possibility of supporting someone else. The sticking point here is their insistence that the government pass a law that formally exempts Haredi students from mandatory military conscription, which Netanyahu has repeatedly struggled to deliver. For decades, Haredi men studying in religious schools have been largely exempt from serving in the Israeli defense forces. This is growing to be really controversial, as the country's wars continue to drag on, is given that the Haredi population has absolutely exploded due to sky-high birth rates, with them now accounting for nearly a third of Jewish first-graders in the country, so the exemption is starting to feel deeply unfair. But the resentment over the exemptions has proven to be a massive drag on Netanyahu and his coalition, and it makes sense why. It's hard to be the guy pushing to keep up the occupation of Lebanon and Gaza, expand claims over the West Bank, go back into war with Iran, and also be in favor of letting a good chunk of the country off the hook for military service, because they voted for you. Nearly two-thirds of the country oppose enshrining the Haredi draft exemptions into law, and even roughly a quarter of the Kurdish and Jewish power voters said they would oppose a new Netanyahu government if it meant draft exemptions. Now, if you're wondering, but Simon, the Haredi parties are only supposed to get 15 or so seats out of the 120, surely Netanyahu could simply go around them and find someone else to work with. Well, we commend your politicking, but there's a minor problem. Most of the other parties have made it absolutely clear that they won't be be gone no matter what, leaving him with very few alternatives to work with. To get a sense of what's going on, we want to turn first to the two leading Zionist opposition parties, Yeshah, led by Gadi Eisenkot, and Baerchad, which is another platform led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Both are polling quite well, with Yeshah leading Likud in most polls. And what's particularly interesting about these men is that despite their rock- solid opposition to Netanyahu, they're not exactly calling for a reversal of Israel's foreign policy. Eisenkot, who previously served as the head of the Israeli military, is a staunch security orc who opposes Palestinian statehood and has promised to eliminate Hamas' control over Gaza. Bennett, for his part, is arguably even more hard-line than Netanyahu when it comes to Palestinian affairs, as he spent much of his political career advocating for greater Israeli control over the West Bank. Even Lapid, who's generally seen as the most moderate of them all, is pretty straightforwardly hawkish by any international standard. There are some important differences, though, especially on public relations and the West Bank. Bennett has frequently said that Israel has a chronic PR problem, and all three men have condemned the growing wave of violence by Jewish terrorists against Palestinians in the West Bank. All three want a stronger crackdown on this violence, which Netanyahu has largely downplayed even though they remain robustly supportive of Israel's security policies. A lot of this has come about through a combination of the country becoming more hawkish as oil is growing exhausted with BB's perceived failure to turn military action into military victories. The opposition's argument is largely that he has failed to deliver the securities, champions, and that Israel needs new leadership capable of doing so. When that frustration extends well beyond the battlefield, the opposition has increasingly portrayed Netanyahu and especially his coalition partners as a liability for Israel. They blame him for the country's growing diplomatic isolation, economic troubles, and a general sense that the government there isn't really functioning. While their claims to magically repair Jerusalem's ties to the rest of the world might fall under the category of wishful thinking, they're at least attempting to present themselves as having a positive vision for the future of the Jewish state. As said, not all of their proposals are unrealistic. Both camps want an independent state inquiry into the failures that allowed the October 7th attacks to take place, and both promising to confront the Haredi draft exemption that has caused Netanyahu so much trouble. Even if they can agree on a path forward though, the maths of current polling means they're nowhere near a majority on their own. Combined, they'd be lucky to scrape together 35 seats, which leaves them just halfway to the finish line of a majority. So, as is always the answer in Israeli politics, just add more parties. Fortunately for them, there are two more Zionist opposition parties that could help close that gap. The first is Havidor Lieberman's Yistrail Beituno, which is fiercely nationalist, but also very secular, especially when it comes to opposing the Haredi draft exemption. The other is Yaya Golan's Democrats, who represent just about the only significant Jewish left-wing party in Israel. They just disagree on just about everything, but they both want BB-Gon, and together they're polling at roughly 17 seats. The problem is that even if all four of those opposition parties work together, they still need to find additional seats to reach the magic number of 61. So, what's one doing in this situation? Altogether this time, please, add more parties. Israel is not a monolithic country. Roughly a fifth of its citizens are Arab, and they largely have their own parties. These voters are primarily split between the Joint List, which brings together several parties focused on Palestinian national rights, and Ra'am, which is more pragmatic, focusing on improving living conditions for Arab Israelis. It probably goes without saying that a coalition of hawkish Zionist parties and Arab parties would go over about as well as a coalition between the Green Party and Reform UK. And while this did briefly come to fruition in the aftermath of the 2021 election, when BB and his Likud were kicked out, the whole thing collapsed in a matter of months. Several of Israel's opposition leaders have made it quite clear that they want absolutely nothing to do with such a coalition. Bennett has ruled out relying on Arab parties to form a government, while Lieberman has taken an even harder line, refusing to participate in a government that partners with them. Eisenhower has been slightly more flexible, but has laid out conditions that neither of the two Arab parties currently meet, so we're not holding our breath on that front. So, if the Arab parties are off the table, there's always the point. There's a possibility of persuading the Haradeem to switch sides. As we mentioned earlier, UTJ has already left their door open. But this opens up a completely different can of words, namely, that one of the few things that opposition parties can agree on is the Haredi draft exemption needs to be a thing of the past. Realistically, there is no great path for either of these two camps to get to a clear majority, which begs the question, what happens if neither can form a government? There's a distinct possibility that once all the ballots are counted, the winner will be quite literally nobody. To get a sense of the problem, we want to look at the latest poll out of the Times of Israel, which came out a few days before the election. It projects Netanyahu's block, winning 51 seats, while the four main Zionist opposition parties are also set to get 51. That leaves 18 total outside the camp, with 14 going to the Arab parties and another four going to a new reservist party, whose raison d'etre is getting the Haradeem to serve alongside everyone else. Other polls have, of course, shown slightly different results, and nobody really knows how this will ultimately shake out until it's over. But the consensus view is that neither camp has a particularly comfortable path to power. After the votes are counted, though, the first thing that will happen is that the Israeli president, who is politically neutral, will consult the newly elected parties and then ask whichever politician he believes has the best chance of forming a government to give it a try. That doesn't necessarily mean the largest party, by the way. Even if LeCou takes 22 seats and Yashar gets, say, 21, Isaac Gott could still be tabbed if President Herzog thinks he has the better chance. As we've seen, this process could be easier said than done. The various red lines drawn by politicians across Israel's political spectrum mean the members won't always add up on paper, and once the election is over, the pressure will only grow for the parties to reevaluate their previous promises about who is strictly off limits to work with. After all, the first group that gets to 61 gets to run the country, while the 59 losers get to sit in opposition with little else to do other than watch for the next several years. There are several ways a race-to-former semi-stable coalition could play out. The most obvious would be for parties to abandon some of their promises, allowing either Netanyahu or Eisenhower to assemble a majority after all, which is ostensibly what they 're both hoping for. Another would be to form a so-called unity government, in which the largest parties team up despite their differences, possibly with a rotating premiership between the leaders. Netanyahu, perhaps sensing is back against the wall, has been the most willing to float this. But it takes two to tango, and likely three for a majority. And right now, BB appears to be dancing alone. Many of the leading Zionist opposition figures have ruled out working with him. An Eisenkot has good reason to be nervous about any such deal, too. Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party did exactly this in 2020, despite campaigning on a promise not to and got completely screwed in the process. He never got to be PM, despite the power-sharing agreement, as the government collapsed in a matter of seven months, and Blue and White isn't even running in the election this year because its supporters abandoned it. Eisenkot, unsurprisingly, is not excited to repeat that experience. If things get really desperate, there's also the possibility of a minority government, which could take office without 61 members, so long as enough lawmakers agree to abstain rather than vote against it. This would avoid some of the more difficult coalition compromises, though it would also leave the new government crippled from the outset. There is one wildcard here worth mentioning, given just how heated the election has become. Most of the hold-up surrounding the Zionist opposition's unwillingness to work with LeCud centers on BB himself rather than the party writ large. Even if the opposition refuses to outright govern alongside the Arab parties, it could potentially work with them in the Knesset to pass legislation to, say, implement retroactive term limits for the PM's office. That would effectively disqualify Netanyahu, potentially opening the door for LeCud to join a broad, unity government with Yeshar. That said, it remains a hypothetical that's far from a likely outcome. So what if everyone digs in their heels and refuses to budge? Well, Israel has just the procedure for exactly that situation. Whoever has knocked Habs to form a government has 28 days to scrape something together with a possible two-week extension. If they fail, another politician could be given a shot, and if that fails, the Knesset gets one final opportunity to pick someone. Should all those tries come up short, though the newly elected parliament is automatically dissolved, and we get to do all of this all over again. At which point, Israel would reach the wonderful milestone of having had as many elections in the last 10 years as the U.K. has had prime ministers. What can I say? Webrids defend Australia's leaders, Israelis repeatedly trudged the ballot box, despite the outcome nearly always seeming to be the BB remains in power. Speaking of which, this is where things get interesting. Even if coalition talks fail and a new election is called, the country wouldn't simply put politics on hold until a decision could be made. The current PM would stay on as caretaker through it all, plus through any subsequent campaign. And this creates the wild possibility that Netanyahu could emerge from this election, having lost his parliamentary majority with his own party trailing the opposition and still remain prime minister for months afterward. So when Israel heads to the polls, BB doesn't necessarily even need to win to remain in power. He just needs everyone else to fail at replacing him. Thank you for watching.