Most Israelis Vote for Someone Else, but Netanyahu Still Rules

Israel is rightly celebrated as a democracy. It is messy, contentious, and frequently dysfunctional, but in some respects, it offers voters more choices than the United States, where two parties monopolize political power. In Israel’s 2026 election, 34 parties competed for votes. Yet, for all those choices, the outcome may be familiar: Benjamin Netanyahu could remain prime minister even though the overwhelming majority of Israelis voted for someone else.

This is not an anomaly. It is the story of Netanyahu’s political career. He has dominated Israeli politics for decades without ever winning anything approaching a majority of the vote for his party. His extraordinary political survival skills have allowed him to turn minority support into governing power, often by making concessions to smaller parties that wield influence far beyond their electoral strength.

The explanation lies in Israel’s parliamentary system. Unlike Americans, Israelis do not vote directly for their national leader. They vote for parties, which receive seats in the 120-member Knesset roughly proportional to their share of the vote. The prime minister is the person who can assemble a coalition commanding the support of at least 61 members.

Israel briefly experimented with direct elections for prime minister, providing the only genuine tests of Netanyahu’s personal popularity.

In May 1996, Netanyahu narrowly defeated Labor’s Shimon Peres, winning 50.5% to 49.5%, a margin of fewer than 30,000 votes. It was the only election in which he could legitimately claim majority support. Just three years later, Ehud Barak crushed him, 56% to 44%. Netanyahu did not compete in the third and final direct election, which Ariel Sharon won in 2001.

The experiment failed because it produced the opposite of what its architects intended. Rather than weakening small parties and strengthening the government, allowing Israelis to cast separate ballots for prime minister and the Knesset encouraged them to vote for a major-party candidate for prime minister while supporting smaller religious, ideological, and special-interest parties for parliament. Labor and Likud lost strength, the Knesset became more fragmented, and small parties gained even greater leverage to demand concessions in exchange for joining a coalition. In 2001, the Knesset restored the traditional parliamentary system.

In every election since 2006 in which Netanyahu led Likud, approximately 70% to 90% of voters chose another party. In 2006, more than nine out of ten Israelis voted for someone else. Even in his strongest showing, in 2020, more than 70% rejected Likud at the ballot box.

These figures do not mean that everyone who voted for another party opposed Netanyahu. Many supported right-wing or religious parties that pledged to join his government. Nevertheless, they illustrate how the man who has ruled Israel longer than anyone else has never come close to winning a majority for his own party.

Even the coalitions he assembled have not necessarily represented a majority of voters. His strongest electoral mandate came in 2013, when parties that ultimately joined his government received approximately 52% of the vote, compared with 43% for parties that remained in opposition. That coalition included Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, both of whom would later become his political adversaries. In 2022, the parties that brought Netanyahu back to power received less than 50% of the vote, yet secured a comfortable 64-seat majority in the Knesset.

Though frustrating for the opposition, the outcome is accepted as legitimate. It is how parliamentary democracy works. It also raises the question: How much of Netanyahu’s political longevity reflects genuine public support, and how much stems from his willingness to make virtually any concession to remain in power?

Every prospective Israeli prime minister faces the same challenge: assembling a coalition. Netanyahu has proved more adept, and more willing, to make the compromises necessary to reach 61 seats, even embracing far-right extremists once considered beyond the pale of Israeli politics. Smaller parties know that their support can determine who governs, and they exploit that leverage to extract ministries, budgets, policy commitments, and exemptions from national obligations.

Tzipi Livni refused to play that game and sacrificed the premiership.

When Ehud Olmert resigned in 2008, Livni, his successor as Kadima leader, could have formed a government without holding an election by meeting the religious Shas party’s demands. Instead, she refused to make the concessions it sought.

“I’ve had enough of extortion,” she said. “There are things the State cannot be sold for.”

Livni gambled that voters would reward her for putting principle ahead of power. In the 2009 election, Kadima won 28 seats, one more than Likud. Nevertheless, because Netanyahu had a more plausible path to a majority, President Shimon Peres let him attempt to form a government. He succeeded.

The 2026 election presented his principal rival, Gadi Eisenkot, with a similar dilemma. His party could win more seats than Likud but, like Bennett and Lapid in 2021, and still fail to reach 61 seats without Arab parties’ support.

Netanyahu understood this political vulnerability and exploited it relentlessly. Throughout the campaign, he and his allies warned that an Eisenkot government would depend on Arab parties whose positions on Israel’s security, national identity, and the Palestinian conflict were unacceptable to many Jewish voters. For some Israelis, opposition to Arab participation reflects prejudice; for others, it reflects genuine concerns about the parties’ positions on fundamental questions of national security. Whatever the motivation, suggesting a government might be dependent on non-Zionist parties is a potent political weapon.

In 2021, Bennett and Lapid assembled a coalition spanning the ideological spectrum, from the nationalist right to the left, and included the Islamist Ra’am party. Their common objective was to end Netanyahu’s rule. But the coalition’s ideological contradictions led to defections that brought the government down.

The result was another election in November 2022, and Netanyahu’s return to power with just 23% of the vote for Likud. More than three-quarters of voters chose another party, yet Netanyahu emerged with a 64-seat coalition and returned to the prime minister’s office.

The 2026 election once again exposed the limits of Netanyahu’s popularity. Likud won just 27 seats and 21% of the vote, down sharply from the 36 seats and 29% it won in 2020. Although the pro-Netanyahu bloc outnumbered its rivals 53 to 48, neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot emerged with a clear path to the 61 seats needed to form a government.

One possibility is that Eisenkot abandons his campaign commitment and seeks support from Arab parties. Even with Ra’am, however, Eisenkot would have only 55 votes, and he is unlikely to consider a coalition with the more radical Joint List, which held 12 seats.

Even without forming a government, the Knesset can convene and pass laws. One far-fetched option is that the opposition in the interim parliament, projected to have 68 votes, could pass a law setting an 8-year term limit for the prime minister and applying it retroactively to prevent Netanyahu from remaining in power. Netanyahu would undoubtedly challenge such a law in court.

Another option is a unity government where one or more parties opposed to Netanyahu join him, perhaps in exchange for a rotation agreement under which he would eventually surrender the premiership.

However, a cautionary tale awaits anyone considering such a bargain.

After three inconclusive elections in 2019 and 2020, Benny Gantz agreed to form a unity government with Netanyahu. The two were supposed to rotate the premiership, with Netanyahu serving first and Gantz succeeding him. Gantz justified the decision as a necessary response to the political deadlock and the COVID-19 emergency.

Netanyahu never relinquished the office. The government collapsed over a budget dispute before Gantz’s turn arrived, a move critics widely regarded as calculated to prevent rotation. It was an object lesson in the danger of trusting Netanyahu to honor a power-sharing agreement.

Gantz never recovered. His credibility shot; Gantz’s party went from 33 seats in 2020 to eight in 2021, and he ultimately retired from politics.

The best outcome for Israel, though the least likely, would be Netanyahu’s resignation. His departure would open the door to new Likud leadership and create an opportunity for a broad unity government that doesn’t depend on religious and far-right parties. Such a government would not solve all of Israel’s problems, but it could begin to heal the divisions at home and abroad that Netanyahu has deepened.

Israel’s current polarization resembles that of the United States, where voters have become entrenched in opposing camps, and compromise is often treated as betrayal. However, one critical difference remains. America’s electoral system always produces a president, even when the winner loses the popular vote, as Donald Trump did in 2016. Israel’s system can produce no winner.

When neither camp can assemble 61 seats, the country can be condemned to months of negotiations, political paralysis, and repeated elections. Between April 2019 and November 2022, Israelis went to the polls five times. The country could face another prolonged period of uncertainty.

Meanwhile, if a new government cannot be formed, guess who serves as prime minister?

Benjamin Netanyahu.

That is one of the secrets of Netanyahu’s political survival. He does not need to convince most Israelis to vote for him. He only needs to keep his opponents from uniting behind an alternative. The coming days and weeks will reveal whether he has once again turned a minority of votes into another term in power.