The Right’s Last Consolidation
On September 8, Israel’s Central Elections Committee closes the rolls for the October 27 vote, and any party that misses that deadline misses the election entirely. Nothing concentrates a fractious political family like a hard date, and nowhere is that more visible than inside the bloc Bezalel Smotrich has spent a decade building.
Smotrich’s Religious Zionism has spent this campaign doing something Israeli parties rarely admit to doing in public: flirting with irrelevance. Polling has put the party above the 3.25% threshold in some surveys and beneath it in others, a volatility that has less to do with Smotrich’s ministry than with who now sits behind him. Only 130 members of the party’s Central Committee selected this cycle’s list, and what they produced tilts hard toward the “Hardal” current, the fusion of ultra-Orthodox religiosity and settlement nationalism that reliably energizes a base and just as reliably caps a ceiling. Ofir Sofer and Moshe Solomon, the ministers most associated with a broader religious-Zionist appeal beyond the settlements, declined to run again rather than carry that list. Smotrich kept two personal appointments in reserve; perhaps even he seems to think the slate needs correcting before voters see it.
Enter Moshe Feiglin. The joint run with Zehut, with Feiglin reportedly taking the number-two slot, is not an ideological marriage so much as an arithmetic one; Feiglin’s small but durable base of libertarian-nationalist voters is worth more to Smotrich merged than it is to Feiglin alone outside the Knesset. Early polling of the combined list has hovered around five seats, which is survival, not strength. Compare that to the mirror image on the other side of the aisle: when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid merged their parties into “Together” earlier this year, the move was about maximizing an already-large bloc. Smotrich and Feiglin are merging to avoid disappearing. Those are different kinds of politics, and Israeli voters are generally able to tell them apart.
The deeper problem for the religious-Zionist right isn’t Feiglin, it’s Ofer Winter. The retired general’s newly launched “People of Israel” party is explicitly built around the voters Religious Zionism has been shedding: nationalist, security-minded, but uninterested in Hardal theology and unwilling to be represented by a slate dominated by settlement absolutists. Kan’s poll after Winter’s entry showed his party crossing the threshold at the direct expense of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and, more dangerously for Netanyahu, the prime minister’s own bloc total. Winter has been careful to position himself as Netanyahu-adjacent rather than oppositional, which makes him harder for Likud to attack and easier for disaffected right-wing voters to choose without feeling they’ve crossed a line.
That leaves Itamar Ben-Gvir as the holdout. Netanyahu has reportedly pushed him to merge with Smotrich on the logic that two mid-sized nationalist lists are more fragile separately than combined; Ben-Gvir has refused, calculating, not unreasonably, that Otzma Yehudit’s brand is more distinct and more valuable to him personally, standing alone. The result is a right-wing flank entering the final week of list-building as three separate projects rather than one consolidated bloc, at the exact moment the opposition has done the opposite.
This is happening against a backdrop the numbers don’t capture. Sara Netanyahu’s recent comments amplifying October 7 conspiracy theories have reopened a wound Likud would rather have kept closed heading into a security-focused campaign, and they land badly alongside a prime minister who still needs the accountability question to stay someone else’s problem. A fragmented right makes that harder to manage, not easier: every seat Winter or a strengthened Ben-Gvir takes from the government bloc is a seat Netanyahu cannot spend arguing that only he can finish the job in Gaza, Lebanon, and now, after Monday’s strikes near Hormuz, potentially Iran.
None of this guarantees Smotrich falls short on October 27, and Israeli elections have punished confident predictions before. But the pattern is legible: the bloc built on ideological maximalism is consolidating out of necessity while the bloc built on removing Netanyahu consolidated out of opportunity. Whether that distinction is one voters reward or simply notice is a question five more weeks of campaigning and one more list-submission deadline will settle.
