Israel Faces Political Deadlock After Vote, With Three Paths to a Government

Early results from Israel's parliamentary election, held on Tuesday, point to a divided outcome in which no camp can assemble a majority on its own. The identity of the next prime minister remains unclear as counting continues.

Based on the tally so far, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud could take as many as 28 seats. His alliance of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties is still expected to land short of the 61 seats required to govern. Yashar, the party headed by his chief rival, former army chief Gadi Eisenkot, appears headed for second place with about 22 seats. The "change" bloc around Eisenkot is projected at roughly 47 seats, also well below the threshold.

Arab parties, which both blocs have said they would keep out of a coalition, are on track for at least 17 seats combined. That total could make them pivotal in any effort to remove Netanyahu. Formal consultations in which parties recommend a prime ministerial candidate to President Isaac Herzog are expected to begin next week, and analysts have already outlined three main scenarios.

The first is a government backed by the change bloc and the Arab parties. Every party in the bloc except the Democrats, led by Yair Golan, pledged during the campaign not to sit with Arab factions, though Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas, an Islamist, joined a centrist coalition in 2021 and 2022. Abbas is again offering to cooperate. Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency the option makes sense mathematically and politically, but that it would break campaign promises and that the public is "deeply unprepared" for it. Tolerance for working with an Islamist party has fallen since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks.

A variation would be a minority government made up of Yashar, B'Yachad (led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid), Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu and the Democrats, with Arab factions backing it on key votes from outside. That could bring the bloc up to 65 seats. Lieberman has rejected the idea, but Prof. Jonathan Rynhold of Bar-Ilan University said he "might say yes if he's the prime minister." The Arab parties, particularly the Joint List, might also demand concessions that Eisenkot would struggle to accept.

The second scenario is a unity government. Plesner said serious negotiations on such an arrangement may be more likely, and imagined Netanyahu would prefer to keep his whole bloc, including Shas, United Torah Judaism and the far-right parties of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, while luring in one change bloc party. Change bloc parties would probably demand a "real unity government," in which Netanyahu drops a far-right party or an ultra-Orthodox party that has resisted a military draft bill. Plesner said the public might live with such a centrist-leaning result, though he could not speak to its political viability. Many change bloc voters, who backed replacing Netanyahu, would likely feel betrayed.

The third scenario is another election. Eisenkot said in his election night speech that a repeat vote would be a mistake after such high turnout. Election officials said 77.7% of voters took part, the highest since 1999. Still, with no bloc holding a majority and deep ideological rifts, Plesner said a new round could suit Netanyahu, who would stay on as interim prime minister. A similar pattern followed 2019, when a series of elections ended with Netanyahu's bloc ousted in March 2021 by a coalition led by Bennett and Lapid, before his return to power in November 2022.

Gideon Rahat, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said he does not know the path forward, adding that a decade ago a unity government might have been likelier, but that entrenched camps now make new elections plausible. Plesner suggested it could be a "time for politicians to get creative" and said it may "take weeks and perhaps months" to settle who becomes prime minister.