How Israeli Elections Work

Israel is a parliamentary democracy. Voters don’t pick a president or prime minister directly — they pick a party, and the parties then negotiate who governs.

The Knesset

The Knesset (הַכְּנֶסֶת, “the Assembly,” 120 seats) is Israel’s only legislative body. There’s no Senate or second chamber, and no separately elected head of government. One ballot, one vote, nationwide.

One country, one district, one list

Israel is a single nationwide electoral district — there’s no “my district’s representative” the way there is in the US or UK. On election day you vote for a party list, not a person. Seats are then divided up nationwide by proportional representation (PR): a party that wins 20% of the vote gets roughly 20% of the 120 seats.

The lists are closed lists: each party ranks its own candidates in order before the election, and voters can’t change that order. If a party wins 10 seats, the top 10 names on its list go to the Knesset — so a candidate’s fate depends as much on their internal party ranking as on the public vote.

Seats are allocated using the D’Hondt method, a formula that slightly favors larger parties over smaller ones when dividing the remainder.

The threshold — and “wasted” votes

A party needs at least 3.25% of the national vote (roughly 4 seats’ worth) to enter the Knesset at all. Fall short, and every vote for that party is discarded — it plays no role in seat allocation.

The threshold has climbed over time: 1% before 1992, 1.5% from 1992, 2% from 2003, and 3.25% since a March 2014 law backed by Benjamin Netanyahu and then–Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Supporters said a higher bar would cut down on party fragmentation and produce more stable governments. Critics — especially the Arab-majority parties, none of which would have cleared the new bar individually at the time — argued the change was aimed at pushing them out of the Knesset, which is part of why the four Arab parties merged into a single Joint List (הרשימה המשותפת) in 2015.

Surplus-vote agreements

Because seats can’t be split into fractions, two parties can sign a surplus-vote agreement (Hebrew: heskem odafim, הסכם עודפים) before the election, based on the Bader-Ofer method. If their combined leftover votes (after whole seats are assigned) add up to one more seat, that seat goes to whichever of the two partners has the larger remainder. This is a technical vote-pooling deal, usually signed between ideological allies — it does not mean the two parties are committing to govern together.

Forming a government

Nobody wins a majority outright under this system — no single party has ever won 61 of 120 seats. So after the vote:

The President (a largely ceremonial head of state, currently Isaac Herzog) consults every party that entered the Knesset and asks who they recommend to form the government.
The President hands one Knesset member a mandate (usually — but not legally required to be — the leader of the largest party) to try to build a majority. That MK gets 28 days, extendable by 14.
That candidate negotiates a coalition — an alliance of parties totaling at least 61 seats — trading cabinet posts, committee chairs, and policy commitments (a coalition agreement, הסכם קואליציוני) for each partner’s support.
If they succeed, the Knesset votes confidence in the new government. If they fail, the President can hand the mandate to someone else; if that fails too, the Knesset dissolves and Israel votes again.

This is why Israel held five elections in under four years (2019–2022) — repeated failures to assemble a stable 61-seat majority.

The opposition

Every party not in the governing coalition is the opposition (האופוזיציה). The leader of the largest opposition party holds the formal title Leader of the Opposition (ראש האופוזיציה), gets security briefings, and has certain procedural rights in the Knesset. The opposition’s job is to scrutinize, vote against, and offer a governing alternative to the coalition.

Who sits with whom, generally

Two broad blocs recur across Israeli elections:

A right-religious bloc: Likud + the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties + religious-Zionist and far-right parties.
A center-left / “change” bloc: centrist, left, and secular-right parties that oppose Netanyahu.

Historically, the Haredi parties have been the classic kingmakers — small but pivotal, generally preferring the right but having sat with the center-left before. The 2021–2022 Bennett-Lapid government broke the mold entirely: an ideologically scrambled coalition spanning right to left that, for the first time, included an Arab party (Ra’am) as a formal governing partner.

Why Israeli “left” and “right” aren’t about economics

This is the single most important thing to understand before reading about individual parties: in Israel, “left” and “right” mostly describe where a party stands on security/territory and on religion-state relations — not on economic policy.

Right generally means: hawkish on security, pro-settlement, skeptical of territorial concessions to the Palestinians.
Left generally means: dovish, open to territorial compromise, prioritizing a negotiated resolution with the Palestinians.
A second, separate axis runs from religious (Haredi/religious-Zionist) to secular.

Economic policy cuts across both axes in ways that would look strange through a US/European lens:

Likud brands itself free-market but governs with heavy sectoral subsidies.
The Haredi parties (Shas, United Torah Judaism) are economically statist and welfare-oriented for their own community, while being about as socially conservative as it’s possible to be.
Yisrael Beiteinu is economically liberal and security-hawkish and militantly secular/anti-Haredi — a combination that doesn’t map onto a single “left” or “right” box at all.

So when you see a party called “left” or “right” in Israeli coverage, it’s almost always a shorthand for its position on the Palestinians and the settlements (and often religion-state issues) — not a statement about its tax or welfare policy.

Where things stand heading into the vote

The next Knesset election is set for October 27, 2026 — the latest date legally possible, and the first election since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack and the wars that followed in Gaza, Lebanon, and against Iran. The outgoing Netanyahu government was the first Knesset since 1988 to complete a full four-year term.

The proximate trigger was a fight over the Haredi military draft exemption (see glossary: Hesder, Tal Law lineage): ultra-Orthodox parties have long secured exemptions from mandatory IDF service for full-time yeshiva students, and a push — intensified after October 7 — to narrow or end that exemption caused United Torah Judaism to quit the governing coalition in July 2025, with Shas resigning its ministerial posts around the same time. The 25th Knesset was formally dissolved on July 17, 2026.

Sources: Wikipedia (2026 Israeli legislative election); cross-checked against Times of Israel, Haaretz, and Jerusalem Post reporting on the threshold history and 2025–26 coalition breakdown.