Politics & Diplomacy
Netanyahu leads Eisenkot again as Israel's blocs both stall below 61
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Image credit: Gadi Eisenkot — Wikimedia Commons / Spokesperson unit, President of Israel · License
Original Reporting
Israel votes on 27 October, and the race that opened the month with Gadi Eisenkot in front has turned again. Maariv's Sunday-night seat poll put Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the former army chief of staff on the direct question of who should be prime minister, 41 percent to 34, and reported his bloc strengthening.
Eisenkot built his party, Yashar, around the accusation that Netanyahu prolonged the war on Gaza for his own political survival. Through July that argument carried him to first place: Channel 12 put Yashar at 24 seats in its late-July survey, one ahead of Likud.
What has not moved is the arithmetic underneath. Neither bloc reaches 61 seats in any recent poll, and the seats that would close the gap belong to the Arab parties both camps say they will not govern with.
Times of Palestine runs this election watch as a standing beat and updates it as the numbers move, in both languages, through election night.
The 10 August state of play#
Maariv's poll of 9 August is the campaign's sharpest reversal so far. Netanyahu's bloc strengthens, Yair Golan's Democrats recover to 10 seats, and both new parties assembled by former Likud figures fall below the electoral threshold.
Those two casualties are the list of Chili Tropper and Yoaz Hendel, and the one Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein are still building. Benny Gantz's Blue and White misses the threshold in the same poll.
For Palestinian voters the poll's most consequential line concerns their own lists. A united Hadash-Ta'al and Balad run polls at eight seats and Ra'am at six, while Balad standing alone wins nothing at all.
The Likud holds its primaries next week, and the party's own Knesset speaker, Amir Ohana, told Maariv on Monday that "if the election were today, the situation is difficult." Ynet described the primaries as the party's hardest in years, with many slots already promised to Netanyahu's picks.
Recruitment runs in both directions. Aliza Bloch, the former mayor of Beit Shemesh, joined the Erdan-Edelstein list, and Shirel Hogeg, a former chief executive of the AM:PM chain, joined Eisenkot's Yashar to lead a government-efficiency programme.
Kan 11 reported that Dedi Simhi is considering leaving Gantz, with Likud weighing a reserved slot for him. The ultra-Orthodox parties, after their ultimatum to Aryeh Deri, Moshe Gafni and Yitzhak Goldknopf expired, are discussing a separate run for the first time.
The 7 August numbers: the deal becomes the campaign#
Maariv's Lazar Institute survey of 7 August set the shape the campaign is still arguing inside. Yashar led Likud 23 to 22, Beyachad sat at 15, and the blocs stood 57 for the Zionist opposition against 49 for the coalition.
The same poll measured the campaign's new center of gravity. Fifty-four percent of Israelis opposed the published Gaza roadmap, rising to 72 percent among coalition voters.
Fifty-five percent opposed bringing Mansour Abbas's Ra'am into the next government even with Yoav Segalovitz on its slate. Eisenkot has made the deal the argument itself, telling supporters Netanyahu "capitulated in his political weakness without achieving the war's objectives."
For Palestinian readers the paradox has hardened into numbers: both blocs' arithmetic runs through the Arab parties' seats, and a majority of the Israeli public refuses the only partnership that would let those seats govern.
Who is gaining and who is falling#
The campaign's clearest trend has been Eisenkot's rise at the expense of the merger that was supposed to own the anti-Netanyahu lane. When Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid fused their parties into Beyachad this spring, the new list polled as high as 26 seats.
Haaretz's poll tracking has recorded an almost unbroken slide since, down to 15 seats in the latest Channel 12 survey. Most of that support moved to Eisenkot after he refused to join a merger negotiated without him, telling interviewers that surprise announcements are "not how you build partnerships," as the Times of Israel reported.
Yair Golan's left-wing Democrats have held steady and edged upward, reaching 10 seats in the newest Maariv poll. Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu also sits at 10, after negotiating over a joint run with Eisenkot he would accept only if it demonstrably adds seats.
On the right, Itamar Ben Gvir's Otzma Yehudit is stable at 8 seats. Bezalel Smotrich — the finance minister who ran the West Bank annexation portfolio — has hovered near the threshold all summer and takes 5 in the latest survey.
Netanyahu's ultra-Orthodox allies Shas, under Aryeh Deri, and United Torah Judaism remain the steadiest components of his bloc at 8 seats each. Benny Gantz, twice Netanyahu's main challenger, has slipped off the board entirely.
The coalitions taking shape#
Three governing scenarios dominate the arithmetic. The first is a broad anti-Netanyahu government led by Eisenkot with Beyachad, the Democrats and Liberman — a bloc of generals and former prime ministers united by little beyond removing Netanyahu.
That combination still lands short of 61 and would need the tacit or formal support of Arab parties its leaders publicly rule out.
The second is Netanyahu's known quantity: Likud, Otzma Yehudit, Religious Zionism and the ultra-Orthodox parties, the coalition that governed through the war. It cannot expand without recovering voters that two and a half years of war, hostage crises and economic strain have moved elsewhere.
The third scenario is the one Israeli commentators discuss most quietly: no majority at all, a caretaker Netanyahu, and a sixth election. Maariv's Matti Tuchfeld recently put the coalition's odds of reaching 61 seats at 11 percent.
The seats nobody will claim#
The balance of the Knesset belongs, on current numbers, to Hadash-Ta'al under Ayman Odeh and Ahmad Tibi and to Mansour Abbas's Ra'am. Haaretz reported in late July that the Arab parties are gaining ground as turnout intentions among Palestinian citizens of Israel recover.
Abbas made history in 2021 as the first Arab party leader to join an Israeli governing coalition. Maariv reported this week that Jewish security figures are approaching him as Ra'am rebuilds its slate.
The paradox that analysts at the Arab Center in Washington call Eisenkot's dilemma cuts both ways. Netanyahu and Bennett have each publicly rejected a government resting on Arab votes, Eisenkot courts a "Zionist majority" by name, and two million Palestinian citizens of Israel are asked to supply the majority for governments that refuse to say their parties' names.
Whether Ra'am supports a government from outside, joins one, or watches a sixth election happen instead is the single decision on which the entire outcome may turn.
What the outcome decides for Palestinians#
No plausible coalition ends the occupation, but the distance between the scenarios is still measured in Palestinian lives. A returned Netanyahu government would keep Smotrich's annexation machinery and Ben Gvir's police in place.
An Eisenkot-led government would enter office committed to repairing relations with Washington and Europe. Eisenkot has spoken of separating from the Palestinians as a security necessity rather than of Palestinian statehood as a right.
For Gaza's reconstruction, for the West Bank's accelerating settlement registration this newspaper has documented, and for the Palestinian Authority's petition to be readmitted to the table, the identity of Israel's next government is the largest single variable of the coming year.
This election watch follows the polls, the mergers, the threshold fights and the quiet talks with the Arab parties until the votes are counted.
