What You See Determines What You Get: Israeli Edition

Offer a new far-right party as an alternative to the current government, and the entire political spectrum shifts sharply to the right

Naftali Bennett, the once—and potentially future—Prime Minister of Israel

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I’ve been struggling with my screenplay today, so I decided to look at Israeli election polls. What I discovered struck me as a useful lesson for people thinking about how elections do or do not reflect the electorate’s actual views.

Over the past six weeks, since the government agreed to a cease fire and the far-right Otzma Yehudit party left the government (while continuing to support it from the outside), the government coalition (including Otzma Yehudit) has polled at between 49 and 56 seats (versus 68 in the current Knesset), while the opposition has polled at between 58 and 66 seats (versus 52 in the current Knesset). (The left-wing Arab-dominated Hadash-Ta’al list, which would not be part of any plausible government, polls at 5-6 seats, bringing the total to 120).

The two coalitions break down as follows:

Government bloc:

• Likud: 21-26 seats (versus 32 currently)

• Ultra-Orthodox parties (Shas + UTJ): 16-17 seats (versus 18 currently)

• Far-right parties (Otzma Yehudit + Religious Zionists): 12-13 seats (versus 13 currently)

Opposition bloc:

• National Unity (center-right): 16-19 seats (versus 8 currently)

• Yisrael Beiteinu (right-wing secularist): 12-16 seats (versus 6 currently)

• Democrats (left-wing Zionist): 11-14 seats (versus 4 currently)

• Yesh Atid (centrist liberal secularist): 8-14 seats (versus 24 currently)

• Ra’am (moderate Islamist and non-Zionist): 4-6 seats (versus 5 currently)

In other words, if an election were held today, Likud would lose seats, though its partners would retain nearly all of theirs, and the opposition would be highly fragmented, with no party surpassing a diminished Likud or even dominating the opposition. This represents a big change from the last election, when the Zionist left was nearly obliterated and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid was by far the largest opposition party. It also represents a big change from the post-October 7th period, when Benny Gantz’s National Unity was polling at around 40 seats. This trend toward fragmentation, though, has been clear for months.

For months as well, though, there has been polling suggesting that Naftali Bennett—the Prime Minister in the previous short-lived government and former head of the Yamina (Right) party, a far-right group that favors the annexation of the West Bank—would be the most popular alternative to Netanyahu, surpassing either Yair Lapid or Benny Gantz in head-to-head competitions for prime minister (which is not how the prime minister is chosen, mind you). Well today there was polling showing how the composition of the next Knesset would change if he entered politics at the head of a new party (as he is expected to do).

Here’s the projected breakdown:

Government bloc: 48 seats

• Likud: 24 seats (versus 21-26 in recent polling without Bennett)

• Ultra-Orthodox parties (Shas + UTJ): 17 seats (versus 16-17 in recent polling without Bennett)

• Far-right parties (Otzma Yehudit + Religious Zionists): 7 seats (versus 12-13 in recent polling without Bennett)

Opposition bloc: 67 seats

• Bennett’s new party: 24 seats (versus 0 without Bennett, obviously)

• National Unity: 9 seats (versus 16-19 in recent polling without Bennett)

• Yisrael Beiteinu: 8 seats (versus 12-16 in recent polling without Bennett)

• Democrats: 10 seats (versus 11-14 in recent polling without Bennett)

• Yesh Atid: 11 seats (versus 8-14 in recent polling without Bennett)

• Ra’am: 5 seats (versus 4-6 in recent polling without Bennett)

Here’s a stacked bar chart showing the effect of Bennett entering the race at the head of a new party (using the average of recent polls for the “Without Bennett” scenario, and using various shades of blue to represent the different parties on the right):

The government bloc loses a few seats relative to the baseline without Bennett. But that is essentially due to the fact that in this poll the far-right Religious Zionist list fails to clear the threshold for inclusion. Both Likud and the ultra-Orthodox do as well with Bennett in the race as they do with him out of the race.

But the opposition bloc, in addition to gaining a few seats, shifts radically in its political complexion. Bennett is more right-wing than National Unity or Yisrael Beiteinu, and much more right wing than the left-wing Democrats or the liberal Yesh Atid. Yet these parties all bleed support to Bennett’s hypothetical party if he enters the race, such that Bennett’s party would be the dominant one, and the resultant coalition government would be far more right-wing than would an opposition coalition in a world without Bennett’s party. Indeed, it would be so right-wing that it’s not clear whether it could retain the support of the Democrats in particular for very long, or even that of Yesh Atid or Ra’am. I am confident that they would join a Bennett government if only to get rid of the current one, initiate a proper investigation into October 7th, and deal with issues related to the ultra-Orthodox like draft exemptions. But how long such a coalition could truly last is harder to predict.

What’s interesting to me, though, is what this says about the preferences of the electorate. If given a choice between Netanyahu’s coalition and a coalition to his left—dominated by National Unity and Yisrael Beiteinu, so still center-right in orientation, but definitely to the left of Likud—polls show that the country would choose the latter. But given the option of a different far-right party untainted by the Netanyahu legacy or his current partners, polls show that the country would emphatically prefer that choice, even though in this hypothetical Netanyahu’s own supporters would largely stick with the current government. The country does not want to move to Netanyahu’s left. They just want to leave Netanyahu—and his ultra-Orthodox partners—behind.

Of course, there are a lot of confounding factors besides Bennett’s politics. Hypothetical candidates often perform better than announced ones, for one thing. Bennett is a former prime minister, and sat in coalition with a number of parties to his left; those two facts might make him significantly more palatable to anti-Netanyahu voters regardless of his politics. And many voters might not even be fully aware how right-wing his views are yet—all sorts of interpretations of these polls are plausible to one degree or another.

Nonetheless: the poll should serve as a reminder that the choices we are given really do shape the choices we make. And the consequences of any given election can therefore be very different from the electorate’s true preferences.