Netanyahu’s Future and Legacy at Stake in Israel’s Oct. 27 Vote

Israel is set to hold national elections on Oct. 27, the first vote since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and the wars that followed. The contest is placing Benjamin Netanyahu’s decades-long political career and legacy at the heart of what many describe as one of the most consequential elections in the country’s history.

Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, has presided over the country’s rise as a free-market, high-tech economy and the expansion of its military influence across the region.

Zvika Klein, editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, told News Media that Israelis under 20 “don’t even know an Israel without him being prime minister,” apart from the brief period between 2021 and 2022 when a coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid governed for just over a year. Bennett and Lapid are seeking office again on a joint slate in the coming election.

Gadi Taub, co-host of Tablet’s “Israel Update” podcast, said voters are likely to focus on one overriding question: which leader is best equipped to carry forward the campaign launched under Netanyahu, particularly the wars that have largely weakened the Iranian-led Shiite network surrounding Israel.

“The job is not finished. On the one hand, you have Netanyahu, who from the first moment, two days after Oct. 7, said that we are going to change the Middle East,” he said.

For many Israelis, the election is a chance to redirect the country after what Eylon Levy, a former spokesman for the State of Israel, called its greatest disaster. Netanyahu, who has spent roughly two decades in office cumulatively, is battling to preserve both his political future and the historical judgment of his tenure.

“He doesn’t want to go down in history books as the man on whose watch the Oct. 7 massacre happened; he wants to have a long political career ahead of him and take the really incredible military achievements of the last few years as a credit to his leadership,” Levy said.

Levy described the contest as an election marked by intense anger over who bears responsibility for the Oct. 7 massacre, as well as mounting concern about the social and economic burden of maintaining the war.

Few polls indicate that either the governing coalition or the opposition bloc led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot will win a majority. Levy said the likeliest result is another political stalemate, leaving Netanyahu as caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed. Israel endured five elections between 2019 and 2022 during an earlier period of prolonged instability.

Israel’s system differs sharply from that of the United States. Voters choose parties rather than individual candidates to represent them in the 120-seat Knesset, and seats are distributed proportionally according to each party’s share of the vote. Parties must receive roughly 3.25% of the vote to enter parliament.

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Because no party has ever secured more than half the vote, coalition negotiations follow every election. The largest parties then work to bring smaller factions into a governing alliance.

“If one can get 61 of the members of Knesset, basically half plus one, to support them as prime minister, then they become prime minister and their teammates from the other parties join as government ministers,” said Levy, host of Israeli Channel 16’s flagship international program, “From Here to There,” as well as the election podcast “EYLON:Israel Electioncast.”

Klein said the current government is the first in several decades to complete a full term in office.

The opposition is loosely organized around the slogan “Rak Lo Bibi,” or “anyone but Bibi,” Klein said. The grouping includes Eisenkot’s Yashar party, BeYachad, led by Bennett and Lapid, and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu. Each of those leaders has worked with Netanyahu at various points in the past.

The informal coalition also encompasses The Democrats, which Klein identified as the most left-leaning party in the broader “change” alliance.

The conservative commentator Taub said, “When you look at the candidates on the left, one after the other, they wanted to stop the war very early already in Gaza. Gadi Eisenkot, the leading contender on the left, wanted to finish the war after the pager operation, where he said we should cut a deal with Hezbollah. Netanyahu kept saying total victory,” he added.

The vulnerability on the right, Taub said, is that victory has not been total.

“We have an existential danger. That danger is Iran, with the support of Russia and China, rehabilitating its nuclear program, which we can’t let happen. It is not all up to us; there is the U.S. dealing directly with this, but this is going to be the decisive issue,” Taub concluded.