If the second candidate also fails, the ball moves to the Knesset's court. Sixty-one MKs may request that the president assign the mandate to an agreed-upon MK, within a period of 21 days, with the final date for such a request being February 10, 2027. The president will assign the mandate to the requested MK within two days, by February 12, 2027, and the chosen MK will be given only 14 days to form a government, until February 26, 2027.
If all attempts fail, the Knesset will be dissolved and Israel will go to new elections. The estimated election date is the last Tuesday before 90 days from the president's announcement of the process's failure, by May 27, 2027.
Meanwhile, the path to agreements within the bloc and with potential partners looks complicated. Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid have not yet clarified whether they are willing to go along with Avigdor Lieberman's move on the chareidi parties, in which he announced readiness for a compromise on the draft law. At the same time, Yair Golan wants to rely on the Arab parties, a scenario Lieberman has ruled out entirely.
The chareidi parties have not yet announced readiness to join or support a government from the outside. In United Torah Judaism it was reported that there are differences of opinion regarding breaking the alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu, and in Shas they made clear that at this stage they do not intend to break the alliance with the right-wing bloc.
Tomorrow the party leaders are expected to hold a conversation in an attempt to agree on a joint candidate for the position of Knesset speaker, as part of a strategy to create momentum of a change of government that will ease the continuation of coalition negotiations. "There are voices and there is a will to form a government, and that's good, but the road is still long... Right now it looks like a maze that's too complex," a source in the change bloc said in a conversation with Walla.
