Informopedia Explains: tonight, millions of Israelis will watch television exit polls and think they are watching a winner being declared. They are not. In Israel, election night is only the opening move in a contest that can run for weeks — and the person who ends up prime minister is not always the leader of the largest party.
Here is how the system actually works, and why the vote on October 27 will not settle who governs Israel.
One ballot, 120 seats, no winner
Israelis do not vote for a prime minister. They vote for a party list, and seats in the 120-member Knesset are handed out by proportional representation: a party’s share of the vote, nationally, becomes its share of the seats. Any party that clears 3.25% of the vote gets in; about a dozen usually do.
The arithmetic guarantees fragmentation. No party in Israel’s history has ever won a majority on its own. A party with 30 seats is a giant; a party with seven can hold the balance of power. That is why final polls showing Netanyahu’s bloc on 50 seats and the opposition scattered across the 50s are not a quirk of this election — they are the system working as designed. The question is never who won the most seats. It is who can put together 61.
The president’s week
Once the count is final — the tally is expected by October 30, with official results on November 4 — the new Knesset is sworn in within 14 days, and President Isaac Herzog takes centre stage. Within seven days of the results, he consults the leader of every party that won seats and asks each one whom they recommend for prime minister. He then hands the mandate to the Knesset member he judges most likely to build a coalition.
That judgement is political, not mechanical. The president can pick someone other than the leader of the largest party if that person can assemble broader support. The mandate-holder gets 28 days to negotiate, and the president can add 14 more — 42 days in total. Those weeks are where governments are actually made: cabinet seats traded, budgets promised, red lines drawn. Every partner wants something, and the deals struck in those rooms shape the government’s whole term.
The confidence vote — and the loophole
Here is the detail most outsiders miss: a new government does not need 61 votes to take office. It needs more “yes” votes than “no” votes. A minority government can govern if other parties abstain or support it from outside. That quirk has saved more than one coalition that could not quite reach the magic number.
If the first nominee fails, the president can hand the mandate to a second candidate, who gets 28 days with no extension. If that fails too, any Knesset member backed by the signatures of 61 members gets 14 days to try. And if every attempt fails, the Knesset dissolves and Israel votes again within 90 days — with the outgoing cabinet staying on as caretaker. It has happened before: Israel held five elections between 2019 and 2022 because no one could hold a coalition together. The outgoing 25th Knesset, by contrast, was the first since 1988 to serve its full four-year term.
The kingmakers this time
Small parties are where elections are won after election day. Ultra-Orthodox parties, whose voters want to preserve the military-service exemption for religious students, can make or break a right-wing coalition. Arab parties, counted separately in most polls, can decide whether a centre-left bloc has any path to 61 at all. And single issues — judicial reform, the cost of living, the war — give small factions leverage far beyond their seat counts.
The precedent everyone cites is 2021. Likud won 30 seats, the most of any party, and could not reach 61. Naftali Bennett became prime minister with a party holding just seven seats, because he could assemble the coalition Likud could not. Largest party, smallest winner — the system allows both.
What this means for October 27
Expect the exit polls, then expect the waiting. The final tally, the president’s consultations, the 28 days that stretch to 42 — each step has its own deadline, and each can slip. While talks drag on, Netanyahu stays on as caretaker prime minister, and the issues that defined the campaign — the war’s aftermath, raids in the West Bank, the deadly Hebron checkpoint attack, the conscription fight — keep moving without a government elected to decide them.
That is the paradox of Israeli democracy: a system designed so that no one can rule alone, in a country where the hardest questions demand a government that can. Tonight’s vote will tell us the shape of the Knesset. It will take weeks to tell us who governs.
