Israel’s election has produced enough competing claims of victory to fill several coalition agreements, but no obvious government. The central problem remains precisely what most pre-election polling anticipated: neither Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the self-described “change bloc” has secured anything approaching a parliamentary majority. The voters have delivered their verdict, but the politicians must now decide which promises they are prepared to sacrifice to make it governable.
Anyone claiming to know what happens next is confusing confidence with knowledge. Several outcomes remain possible, and their relative likelihood can change within a news cycle.
The polls nevertheless missed two important developments: the strength of the Arab vote and Netanyahu’s advantage over the Zionist opposition. The completed count puts his bloc on 53 seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s on 48, and the two Arab lists on 19. Netanyahu has lost his majority, but his opponents have failed to assemble a politically compatible alternative.
Anyone claiming to know what happens next is confusing confidence with knowledge. Several outcomes remain possible, and their relative likelihood can change within a news cycle.
Coalition negotiations are conducted through public declarations, private conversations and calculated leaks, with each participant trying to make somebody else pay the price of compromise.
The first possibility is a unity government built around Likud and Eisenkot’s Yashar, probably including Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad. Together, their 27, 21 and 12 seats would produce exactly 60, requiring another partner for an outright majority.
Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu might look an obvious addition, but he has reiterated that he will not serve with Netanyahu as prime minister. Eisenkot has also rejected such a partnership, though with less vociferousness, while some Likud figures have resisted rotating prime ministers.
The deeper difficulty is trust. A Netanyahu–Eisenkot arrangement would probably require sharing power, potentially through rotation, but drafting an agreement is easier than convincing either leader that it would be honoured.
Eisenkot hardly needs reminding what happened to Benny Gantz: the rotation government established in 2020 collapsed before Gantz reached the premiership. Any new agreement would therefore face a question that legal safeguards cannot entirely answer: why should this time be different?
A second possibility is an Eisenkot-led minority government supported from outside by Arab parties. There is an important distinction here: 61 seats constitute an outright parliamentary majority, but a government can take office with a simple majority of votes cast in its confidence vote, although this would be unprecedented.
Abstentions can therefore matter almost as much as endorsements. The arithmetic offers possibilities that the familiar division into rival blocs can obscure.
Liberman’s position, shared less vociferously by Bennett, captures the opposition’s dilemma: agreement about who should replace Netanyahu does not amount to agreement about how to replace him.
Yet arithmetic cannot dissolve political objections. Liberman confirmed that he would recommend Eisenkot for prime minister while rejecting a minority government dependent on Arab support, and without his support, the numbers of those who could possibly support such an understanding would be 60.
Liberman’s position, shared less vociferously by Bennett, captures the opposition’s dilemma: agreement about who should replace Netanyahu does not amount to agreement about how to replace him.
Such a government might pursue immediate objectives, including a state commission of inquiry into October 7 and legislation limiting the tenure of prime ministers. However, those ambitions would still require workable parliamentary agreements. A coalition assembled around removing one man could quickly discover that security policy, budgets and national service demand answers its partners cannot collectively provide.
Instability would not be inevitable, but it would be a serious risk.
Liberman’s warning is politically intelligible: a short-lived alternative could give Netanyahu an opportunity to argue that his opponents can obstruct government but cannot sustain one, and is dependent on non-Zionist or anti-Zionist factions.
Those who broke campaign commitments to establish it would face the electorate carrying responsibility for both the compromise and its failure.
The third possibility is another election. Israel has travelled this road before: April 2019, September 2019 and March 2020 brought three elections in less than a year. Repetition eventually changed the political arrangements, but repeated voting did not immediately resolve the underlying divisions.
The obvious question is what another contest would change now. Netanyahu’s bloc needs eight additional seats for a majority; Eisenkot’s needs 13. Campaigns can shift opinion, turnout can change and parties can reorganise, but nobody should assume that another ballot would conveniently deliver the glaringly missing numbers.
President Herzog wants another election avoided. So, publicly, does almost everyone else. Nevertheless, I regard it as marginally the likeliest outcome
Other arrangements remain conceivable, including cooperation between opposition parties and the strictly Orthodox factions. That would bring military enlistment to the centre of negotiations, requiring concessions on one of the opposition’s defining commitments. Such an agreement could produce a government while damaging the political case on which many of its members were elected.
President Herzog wants another election avoided. So, publicly, does almost everyone else. Nevertheless, I regard it as marginally the likeliest outcome, because every alternative requires somebody to abandon a major promise and trust a partner they campaigned against.
No leader wants responsibility for sending Israelis back to the polls, but fewer still want to break their word, enter an unstable government and face another election anyway. Gantz’s experience with Netanyahu and his subsequent political demise will weigh heavily.
Israel’s next government could depend on who concludes that compromise is less dangerous than keeping every promise.
