With roughly 91% of votes counted on Thursday, Israel’s election arithmetic had settled into a familiar shape: Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc stood on 53 Knesset seats, Gadi Eisenkot’s on 48, and the Arab-led parties on 19. No side was near the 61 needed to govern alone. The figures, reported by the Central Elections Committee and carried by Israeli media, remain provisional while hundreds of thousands of double-envelope ballots are counted.
But they have already revived a pattern that has defined Israeli politics since the state’s founding: elections decide the relative strength of parties, then hand the real contest to coalition negotiators. Likud was projected to win 26 seats, followed by Eisenkot’s Yashar on 21 and the Bennett-Lapid Together list on 12. The Joint List had 11 and Ra’am eight, while the Democrats had eight.
A cluster of seven-seat parties — Shas, United Torah Judaism, Yisrael Beytenu and Otzma Yehudit — again illustrated why small factions can command outsized leverage. Turnout reached 77.7%, its highest level since 1999. Yet a larger vote has not produced a clearer route to power.
Assaf Shapira of the Israel Democracy Institute cautioned before the final count that ballots still to be tallied were unlikely to alter the underlying balance when each main bloc remained so far from a viable coalition.
A system built for bargaining Israel elects its 120-seat Knesset through nationwide proportional representation, with parties required to clear a 3.25% threshold. The arrangement gives representation to religious, secular, Arab, ideological and personality-driven lists. It also guarantees bargaining after almost every election. No party has ever won the 61 seats required for an outright Knesset majority. Every Israeli government has therefore been a coalition, and the Israel Democracy Institute says post-election governments have included between three and nine factions. That history makes a divided result less exceptional than it can appear from abroad. The question after October 27 is not simply who finished first. It is which leader can assemble partners without breaking pledges made during the campaign, and whether reluctant rivals decide that another election is worse. The closest modern precedent came in July 1984, when the Alignment won 44 seats and Likud 41. Neither could govern without the other or with a precarious assortment of smaller parties. They chose a national-unity government instead, with Shimon Peres serving first as prime minister and Yitzhak Shamir taking over under a rotation agreement. That deal steadied the country, but did not end manoeuvring. In March 1990, Peres brought down the unity government in a 60-55 no-confidence vote after Shamir dismissed him from the cabinet. Peres then failed to build his own majority; Shamir eventually returned with a narrow right-wing coalition. The episode became known in Israel as the “dirty trick”, a reminder that toppling a government and replacing it are different political tasks.
“The public voted for change. The coalition of failure has lost the people’s trust.” — Gadi Eisenkot, election night, October 27
Near ties and decisive holdouts
Israel briefly tried direct elections for prime minister between 1996 and 2001, but even that did not remove coalition politics. Netanyahu beat Peres in the first such vote in May 1996 by fewer than 30,000 votes, a margin below 1 percentage point, then still had to negotiate a parliamentary coalition. Ehud Barak’s more decisive personal victory in 1999 similarly did not spare him the need for several partners.
In 2009, Kadima won 28 seats to Likud’s 27. President Shimon Peres nevertheless gave Netanyahu the first chance to form a government, reflecting the calculation that the Likud leader had a better path through the smaller parties. The 2019-22 cycle exposed the cost when that calculation repeatedly fails.
Israel held five elections in less than four years. In April 2019, Likud and Blue and White won 35 seats each, and Avigdor Liberman’s refusal to join a Netanyahu coalition over ultra-Orthodox military-service policy forced a new election. A Netanyahu-Gantz rotation agreement after the March 2020 vote later collapsed.
In June 2021, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid finally assembled a government approved by 60 votes to 59, with Ra’am becoming the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli coalition. Netanyahu’s bloc then won a clearer 64-seat majority in November 2022 — proof that deadlock is common, rather than permanent.
Arab vote changes the pressure points
This election has one striking difference. The projected 19 seats for the Joint List and Ra’am would be a record for Arab-led parties, surpassing the Joint List’s 15 seats in 2020. Together with Jewish-led opposition parties, they could in numerical terms command roughly 67 seats.
That has not translated into an agreed governing formula.