Election Results: Israel Deadlocked, No Clear Winner

Israel’s parliamentary election ended in deadlock, with the first election results showing neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc nor the opposition led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot on a path to the 61 seats needed to form a government. Exit polls and the partial counts that followed told the same story: a country split almost evenly, a parliament with no majority, and weeks of coalition bargaining ahead.

With just over 57 percent of the vote counted by 8 a.m. local time on Wednesday, Israeli media tallies put Netanyahu’s coalition on track for 56 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, with Eisenkot’s opposition bloc on 49. The Arab-led parties, projected to win between 16 and 18 seats, hold the balance in a parliament where neither side can govern without them — and where both leading candidates have ruled out governing with them. The final result will take days to settle, with ballots cast by soldiers on duty still to be counted.

Election Results: Exit Polls Point to a Deadlocked Knesset

The three main broadcasters — Channel 12, Channel 13 and the public broadcaster Kan — published exit polls within minutes of the stations closing at 10 p.m. local time. Their projections put Netanyahu’s bloc at 50 seats and Eisenkot’s opposition at 52 to 53, with the Arab-led parties on 17 to 18. Two of the exit polls had the two main blocs deadlocked on 51 seats each, while a third gave Netanyahu’s camp a lead of three seats. A separate survey by i24NEWS was more favourable to the prime minister, putting his bloc at 55 seats against 49 for Eisenkot’s, with the Arab parties on 16.

Every projection agreed on one point: Netanyahu’s Likud would be the largest single party in the next Knesset. Channel 13 put Likud on 25 seats and Eisenkot’s centrist Yashar party on 23. Channel 12 projected 24 for Likud and 22 for Yashar, Kan gave Likud 25 and Yashar 21, and i24NEWS put Likud on 27 against 20 for Yashar. Being the largest party brings prestige and the first claim on forming a government, but no party has ever won 61 seats outright; the prize goes to whoever can assemble a coalition.

The partial counts that came in overnight complicated the picture without changing it. With more than half the vote tallied, Channel 12 and the Ynet news site projected Netanyahu’s bloc at 55 seats — down sharply from the 68-seat coalition he led in the outgoing Knesset — while the parties opposed to him were together on course for 65 seats. Exit polls can be wrong, and the broadcasters’ own history says so. Avigdor Liberman, who leads the Yisrael Beiteinu party, said the picture would become much clearer later in the week.

Voter Turnout: Record Participation Since 1999

If the result was inconclusive, the turnout was not. The Central Elections Committee said about 77.7 percent of eligible voters cast ballots — more than 5.69 million people out of roughly 7.33 million registered. That is about 7.1 percentage points higher than the 70.63 percent recorded in the 2022 election, and the highest turnout in a Knesset election since 1999, when 78.7 percent of voters took part. Turnout among Palestinian citizens of Israel was described as historic.

At the headquarters of the Joint List, an alliance of Arab parties, supporters erupted in whistles and applause as the exit polls were published. Yousef Jabareen, the leader of the Joint List, called the election a historic day and said voters had delivered a clear and sharp message, calling his voters a political force that cannot be ignored. The government of bloodshed must go, he said. Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, the United Arab List, also welcomed the projected results.

Election Results: The 61-Seat Math and the Arab Kingmakers

The arithmetic of the next Knesset is unforgiving. One hundred and twenty seats are divided by proportional representation among more than 30 party lists. A government needs 61 seats, and the exit polls put Netanyahu’s bloc at 50 and Eisenkot’s at 52 or 53. The remaining 16 to 18 seats belong to the Arab-led parties, which are not formally part of either main bloc.

That makes the Arab parties the kingmakers of this election, and it also makes the arithmetic nearly impossible. Both Netanyahu and Eisenkot have ruled out partnering with them, citing a lack of shared values. So the seats that could decide the government belong to parties that neither side will work with, and the two blocs are left to hunt for a majority among the smaller Jewish-led parties in the middle.

The fragmentation runs through the opposition as much as through the government side. Eisenkot’s bloc is made up of four Jewish-led movements — Yashar, the Democrats, Yisrael Beiteinu and the Together alliance — alongside the Arab parties, and they are divided between right, left and centre. Neither Naftali Bennett nor Liberman, whose parties sit inside the opposition’s projected total, has endorsed Eisenkot for prime minister. Yashar itself, at 21 to 23 seats, is the largest party in the opposition, but it has no agreed path to power. On the other side, Netanyahu’s bloc is made up of Likud, the two far-right parties led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. The pre-election polls had put that bloc at between 49 and 55 seats, and the exit polls landed squarely inside that range.

Politics News: Reactions From Netanyahu, Eisenkot and Lapid

Netanyahu was defiant in the early hours of Wednesday, moving quickly to frame the result as a mandate for his camp and to position himself to remain the country’s longest-serving prime minister. We must establish a strong, right-wing, nationalist government, he said. We must not endanger Israel and establish a government that relies on anti-Zionist Arab parties. It was a warning aimed at the talks ahead: any government depending on Arab parties would be illegitimate.

Eisenkot read the same numbers the other way. The exit polls showed a lack of confidence in the current prime minister, he said. Yair Lapid, the current opposition leader, went further. Don’t let anyone confuse you, he said in a statement. The Netanyahu bloc has suffered a crushing defeat. This is a total collapse, and the public has told them to go home.

Yair Golan, the leader of the opposition Democrats, said Israeli voters had fired the Netanyahu government and pledged to work with political partners to form a new administration. We have received a historic opportunity to establish a true government of change in Israel, he wrote on social media, and we have no intention of giving it up. His language captured the opposition’s mood: not just that Netanyahu had lost his majority, but that the voters had delivered a verdict on his government as a whole.

The prime minister’s allies pushed back. Gideon Saar, the foreign minister and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the opposition’s celebrations were premature. In a social media post, he criticised the pronouncements of biased commentators and said Likud is the largest party in Israel, adding that it is always good to learn something from the past.

Elections: The Referendum on October 7

The election was the first national vote since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, and the wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran that followed, and the campaign was fought above all on security and accountability. Pre-election polling suggested that security was the main concern of more than a third of the Israeli electorate, and the opposition made the October 7 attacks the centre of its case. Eisenkot, who served as the military’s chief of staff from 2015 to 2019, demanded a state commission of inquiry into the failings that preceded the attacks, and argued that Netanyahu was dangerous for Israel’s security. Shortly before the stations opened, he told voters to remember the hour of the attacks when they went to vote. He later voted in the southern city of Ashdod.

Netanyahu, 77, has served as prime minister for nearly 19 of the past 30 years, and has repeatedly survived political crises that would have ended other leaders. His opponents have managed to wrest the premiership from him only once since 2009, after four inconclusive elections in two years.

The final surveys before a polling blackout took effect on Friday had put Yashar narrowly ahead of Likud, with Eisenkot’s party on 22 to 24 seats and Likud on 21 to 23. The Together alliance led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid was projected at 13 to 14 seats, the Democrats led by Yair Golan at eight to nine, and the Joint List of three Arab-led parties at nine to 10, with the smaller parties at seven to eight seats each. The exit polls landed close to those forecasts for the two frontrunners, and the story of the night was not a surprise winner but the confirmation that neither side could win.

What Happens Next: Herzog, Coalition Talks and the Caretaker Question

The immediate question is when the result becomes final. The count is expected to take a few days, with soldiers’ ballots still to be tallied. Ehab Jabareen, a Palestinian political analyst and researcher in Israel, told Al Jazeera that the early projections showed a clear weakening of Netanyahu’s bloc, but cautioned against declaring either a Netanyahu victory or the end of his political career. The exit polls suggest that his bloc has lost its majority, he said, but they also suggest that his opponents face a difficult task in building one. If neither side can form a government, Netanyahu could remain in office as caretaker while the negotiations continue.

Once the count is final, the process moves to President Isaac Herzog, who will meet the leaders of all the parties and ask the person most likely to command a majority to try to form a government. That person has up to six weeks. If they fail, others can be given a turn, so the talks could run for weeks or even months. Israel has been here before: four inconclusive elections between 2019 and 2021 left the country without a stable government for two years.

For watchers of us politics, the timing adds another layer. The deadlock lands six days before the November 3 midterm elections in the United States, at a moment when the Trump administration is pressing ahead with diplomacy on several fronts at once, including the Ukraine talks it hopes to restart in November.

The likeliest outcomes are all uncomfortable. Netanyahu could try to assemble a government from the parties of his bloc plus defectors from the centre, but that would require peeling away lawmakers who campaigned against him. Eisenkot could try to build a coalition of the opposition’s fragments plus the Arab parties, but that needs leaders who have not endorsed him. Or neither could succeed, and Israel could drift toward another election — the outcome nobody campaigned for, and the one the record turnout suggests voters least wanted. The ballots are counted, the turnout was historic, and the government is still to be decided.

Source: BBC