The strategic failures that left Israel with no majority

Israel's 2025 elections have ended in a political stalemate. The right cannot form a government; the left can barely assemble a blocking majority. What went wrong for each side?

Likud never built a Levin party

For years, Netanyahu's path to a coalition required either pulling mandates from left to right or hoping the left would collapse at the ballot box. In 2009 he brought in Barak. In 2013, Lapid and Livni. In 2015, Kahlon. In 2020, Gantz.

In 2022, the collapse of Meretz and Balad handed the right 64 seats. But that scenario did not repeat itself this time: the left organised its six parties efficiently and lost not a single vote.

Disappointed right-wing voters looked for somewhere to go that was not Likud, not Smotrich, and found nothing. They considered Winter, but the relentless campaign against him made clear he had no chance of crossing the threshold. In desperation, some turned to Hendel-Zelekha and even to Eisenkot and Bennett. Those votes are a loss for the right.

Had Netanyahu cultivated a soft-right party, a Levin party, he would have gained at least three more mandates for the bloc and moved closer to the desired 61. But paranoia over Winter did its work: Netanyahu fought him and caused two mandates to burn.

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir ignited the Arab sector

Smotrich's strategists ran a campaign promising "what we did in Judea and Samaria, we'll do in the Negev and the Galilee." It may have sounded good in the office, but in practice it created violent confrontation in the Galilee and fuelled the Arab mobilisation campaign. Arab turnout surged to unprecedented levels, delivering 19 mandates to Arab parties.

This helped push Winter and Hendel below the threshold and shrink the left bloc, but it did not help the right reach 61. It is unclear how many voters in the Galilee and Negev this brought in, but the high turnout reduced Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to a disappointing six or seven mandates each.

Bennett and Eisenkot turned left instead of right

If Netanyahu needed to move mandates from left to right, Bennett and Eisenkot were supposed to pull mandates from right to left. Eisenkot's list, which was placed on Srugim, appealed strongly to the religious-Zionist sector. But instead of running a security-focused, hawkish campaign in the style of Rabin in 1992, they veered into left-wing territory with declarations about repealing judicial reform, establishing a state commission of inquiry, and a host of other statements that did not interest the right-wing voter.

Bennett, who came from Bayit Yehudi and the right, had already crossed every line by joining Lapid, and he too only drove voters away. When he fell to single digits, he realised no right-wing voter would come to him and he too turned left. Instead of ensuring the left bloc reached 61, he worried that Eisenkot would overtake him by a wide margin, become the largest party and win the mandate to form the next government, at his expense.

The result: intra-bloc cannibalism that brought in no voters. Four or five mandates that left the right bloc stayed with Winter and Hendel-Zelekha and went into the bin, distributed among all the parties, mainly to the Arabs and to Likud, instead of reaching the left bloc.

Winter should have merged

The most strategic error was Ofer Winter's. He thought he could run as a centre party and avoid attacks from right and left. The moment Netanyahu began to fear he would cross to the left bloc, a brutal, almost unrestrained campaign began against him, claiming he would not cross the threshold.

A merger between Winter and Hendel (instead of Zelekha), or with Likud, as was proposed to him, would have allowed him a quiet campaign and entry to the Knesset. But the ego was too strong. Bad advice and above all a poor campaign brought him far below the threshold, and he will be remembered as the man who burned two mandates for the right (and fortunately only two).

Hendel and Zelekha came closest to the threshold. Perhaps the campaign was too short, perhaps Hendel's zigzags (who remembers he was once allied with Chili Tropper?), perhaps Winter trampled their space and took their votes. Or perhaps there is no room for a party of nice people in a brutal inter-bloc struggle. High turnout also brought them down. Of all the players who did not cross, Hendel is the only one who can come to the next election with a fixed number of voters for negotiation over a place on a list.

The farce of the election: the Noam party

A week before the election, the Noam L'Yisrael party held an activists' conference with 3,000 people. There was a promise that each would bring 50 voters to reach 150,000 and cross the threshold. In practice, each voter brought his parents, and even that barely.

Had they withdrawn a week earlier, they would have earned points for bloc responsibility and preserved the myth that they have 50,000 voters. Now, having tested their strength on the ground, it has been proven they are nothing.

Shas's campaign copied the Noam party

Ironically, Shas and Noam ran the same campaign ("I have chosen the way of faith"). Instead of talking about what the party could achieve, they talked about Jewish education. Videos depicting a reality of lack in Jewish education. The result of the campaign was that Noam was completely erased, and Shas was cut in half. Running a campaign on education, in a world of the Teachers' Union and the Teachers' Organisation, is apparently a recipe for political suicide.

Who was the genius on United Torah Judaism's campaign team who let Goldknopf be interviewed a week before the election and scatter all his condescending statements about Israeli society?

In the end, as in every election, they achieved their fixed number of mandates. Accounting for natural growth, this represents a decline. For twenty years now.

On the other side of the map, Yair Golan supplied at least once a week a radical left-wing statement that damaged the left bloc and drove away right-wing voters. In the Yachad campaign they managed to lock Lapid in some dungeon so he would not cause harm; in the Democrats they sent him out to commit "electoral terror" twice a day. There too it ended in a lukewarm result.