30 Years of Comebacks: How Netanyahu Still Holds the Key to Israel’s Next Election

If you read the headlines about Israel’s upcoming election, you might conclude Benjamin Netanyahu is finished.

Israel is scheduled to hold elections on October 27, and recent polls certainly show trouble for Netanyahu.

Recent polling indicates that former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot’s new Yashar party has secured 24 Knesset seats, while Netanyahu’s Likud holds 22, and Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad has 15.

In a direct question about suitability for prime minister, Eisenkot led Netanyahu with 44% to 34%.

Those numbers are real but can also be deceiving.

Israel does not have an American-style presidential system. Israelis do not directly elect a prime minister. Instead, they elect a 120-member Knesset through nationwide proportional representation, and it takes a governing coalition controlling at least 61 seats to produce a government.

Israel’s political system reflects the extraordinary diversity of the country built after 1948 — immigrants from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and eventually the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia; secular and religious Jews; Arabs; and communities speaking different languages and carrying very different political traditions.

The proportional parliamentary system adopted by Israel’s founders allowed relatively small political movements to gain representation. Today, a party generally needs 3.25% of the vote to enter the Knesset. The result is political fragmentation that can look bewildering to Americans.

Netanyahu has mastered it better than anyone.

He first became prime minister in 1996. He returned to power in 2009 and remained prime minister for 12 consecutive years. After losing power in 2021, he was declared politically dead.

Still, he came roaring back following the 2022 election and formed another government that he continues to lead.

That makes Netanyahu not simply another Israeli politician. He is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history.

And his political durability rests on something opinion polls asking whether voters “like” Netanyahu can miss: the strength of Israel’s broader right-religious electorate.

Likud, the party transformed into a governing force by Menachem Begin, built a powerful coalition among voters who felt ignored by Israel’s old Labor establishment. It developed especially deep support among Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews whose families came from Arab and Muslim countries.

Over the past two decades, Israel itself has also moved significantly to the right on security. It is not difficult to understand why. Israelis have endured two intifadas, suicide bombings, Hezbollah rockets, Hamas attacks, the Oct. 7 massacre, and repeated confrontations with Iran and its regional proxies.

Security in Israel is not an abstract campaign issue. For many families, it is personal.

Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population is growing much faster than the non-Haredi Jewish population. The Israel Democracy Institute estimates the Haredi population at about 1.45 million in 2025 and notes a fertility rate of roughly 6.5 children per woman in 2021–2023, compared with 2.2 among other Jewish women.

That does not mean every religious voter supports Netanyahu. Far from it. But it does mean that religious parties — which have frequently been Netanyahu’s coalition partners — represent an increasingly important component of Israeli politics.

This is why the question “How popular is Bibi?” is often the wrong question. The better question is: Can anybody assemble 61 Knesset members without him?

Netanyahu understands this arithmetic perfectly. He has repeatedly warned voters on the right that supporting small parties can inadvertently help his opponents if those parties fail to clear the electoral threshold.

That is not merely campaign rhetoric. Israel’s system can effectively erase the votes cast for parties that fall below the threshold.

The same phenomenon helped produce Netanyahu’s remarkable 2022 comeback. His Likud won 32 seats. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid won 24. But Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious partners brought his bloc to 64 seats — three more than necessary for control of the Knesset.

And remember what preceded that election. In 2021, Naftali Bennett succeeded in removing Netanyahu by assembling one of the strangest coalitions in modern Israeli history. It brought together parties from the right, center, and left and, historically, included the Islamist Ra’am party. They agreed on one enormous thing: Netanyahu had to go. On many other major questions, they agreed on remarkably little.

The anti-Netanyahu coalition lasted only about 18 months before Israel returned to elections.

Netanyahu’s political obituary had already been written countless times. Yet in November 2022, his center-right bloc captured 64 seats and restored him to power.

The latest polls clearly show Netanyahu facing a difficult election. Recent surveys indicate that Eisenkot’s Yashar is ahead of Likud in most recent polling. One poll places Yashar at 26 seats and Likud at 23.

But even those polls demonstrate the central problem facing Netanyahu’s opponents: Winning more seats than Likud is not the same thing as forming a government. A recent poll shows the current coalition-aligned bloc at 50 seats, the opposition at 59, and Arab parties at 11.

That is a bad poll for Netanyahu. It is not necessarily a road map for removing him. To do that, parties that disagree profoundly on security, religion, settlements, judicial policy, and the Palestinian question may have to cooperate — directly or indirectly — around a common objective of denying Netanyahu another government.

There is another revealing anecdote. When President Donald Trump reportedly asked Netanyahu in the Oval Office in July how he was doing in the election, a Netanyahu adviser interjected: “Mr. President, he is winning.”

Perhaps that was political bravado. But after three decades of Netanyahu comebacks, it would be foolish to dismiss it.

Netanyahu’s political strength has never depended solely on winning a national popularity contest. It depends on holding together enough of Israel’s nationalist, conservative, and religious electorate to make himself indispensable to the formation of a 61-seat majority.

That is what foreign observers often miss. Israel may be divided over Netanyahu personally. Israelis argue fiercely over his policies, his personality, and his long tenure.

But the political coalition from which Netanyahu draws his power remains substantial. When Israelis vote for a right-leaning party not Likud, they typically ask the leadership if they plan to support Netanyahu’s party. If they dare to say no, the party usually sees public support drop.

The smaller parties usually have highly specific agenda items they want accomplished but under the banner of a Likud-led government.

The 2026 election could certainly end the Netanyahu era. Current polling shows a genuine path for his opponents. But Israeli elections are decided not by a single popularity number and not by which politician receives the nicest headline.

They are decided by blocs, parties, thresholds, and coalitions.

For 30 years, nobody in Israeli politics has played that game more successfully than Benjamin Netanyahu.