Elections will be held again in Israel this fall. But who is actually eligible to vote? How do the various electoral alliances come about? And what hurdles must parties overcome to be elected to the Knesset? The following article provides insights into the Israeli electoral system.
From mena-watch | The independent Middle East think tank
The Knesset
The heart of Israel's democratic institutions is the Knesset, with its 120 members. No single party has ever managed to win an absolute majority. The Knesset (Hebrew for "Assembly") is the unicameral parliament of the State of Israel, located in Jerusalem. It consists of 120 members who are elected for a four-year term using proportional representation.
Every citizen of Israel is eligible to vote upon reaching the age of 18; the right to stand for election begins at age 21. However, certain individuals, including the President, the Chief Rabbis, judges, the President of the Audit Office, and the Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, are generally ineligible to stand for election.
The legal basis of the Knesset is the “Basic Law: the Knesset”, adopted in 1958 and adapted several times since, one of a total of fourteen basic laws that together form the constitutional order of Israel.
Historically, the Knesset was the successor to the Constituent Assembly. It first convened on February 14, 1949, a few weeks after the first election was held on January 25, 1949.
Choose
While theoretically elected for a four-year term, the full legislative period is usually not served, with early elections being held only six times.
New elections must be held if parliament dissolves itself by a simple majority vote and sets a new election date, if the budget law is not passed within a set timeframe, if the president dissolves parliament on the recommendation of the prime minister, or if it proves impossible to form a new government.
Israeli voters have been called to the polls 25 times to elect their parliament, most recently on November 1, 2022. The election for the 26th Knesset must take place by October 27, 2026 at the latest.
There is only one constituency. Party lists must clear the 3.25 percent threshold. For a long time, the hurdle was only one percent, which resulted in numerous small and micro-parties being represented in parliament. To counteract this, the threshold was first raised to 1.5 percent in 1988 and then to two percent in 2003. Since 2014, the current threshold of 3.25 percent has been in effect, which corresponds to approximately four seats.
Right, left, Arabic
No party has yet managed to win an absolute majority of 61 seats in an election. Therefore, there has never been a single-party government; the formation of coalition governments has always been necessary.
Before the current right-wing government could be formed, Israel saw a series of closely spaced elections, necessitated by a de facto stalemate between the various political camps and the impossibility of forming stable governing coalitions. Thus, Israeli voters were called to the polls five times between April 2019 and November 2022.
The political stalemate between the political camps was not simply a division along a right-left axis, as right-wing parties such as Yisrael Beiteinu ("Our Home Israel"), led by Avigdor Lieberman, and HaYamin HaChadash ("The New Right"), led by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, were also represented in the opposition. Rather, the decisive factor was support for or opposition to long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Also standing apart from the usual right-left political spectrum are the ultra-Orthodox parties, which, although right-wing, have formed coalitions with both the right and left wings throughout Israel's political history. For them, the decisive factor is which coalition partners guarantee the funding of their own school system and the – increasingly controversial – exemption of ultra-Orthodox Jews from compulsory military service.
The Arab parties in the Knesset primarily represent the interests of Israel's Arab minority, which comprises approximately 20 percent of the population. They differ significantly in ideology, ranging from socialist-Jewish-Arab (Hadash / "Democratic Front for Peace and Equality") to Islamic-conservative (Ra'am / "Joint Arab List"). Ra'am, the party representing an Arab party, participated in the government coalition of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid from June 2021 to December 2022, marking the first time in Israeli history that an Arab party was part of the government.
Alliances
Electoral alliances are not uncommon in Israel's political system. They enable parties to overcome the hurdles to entering the Knesset, posed by the proportional representation system and the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, through strategic cooperation.
On the one hand, there are joint electoral lists, in which several parties run as a single entity with a common program and a joint list of candidates. Examples of this would be the Kahol Lavan ("Blue and White") alliance under Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid, which was the second strongest force after Netanyahu's Likud in 2019-2020, or the HaTzionut HaDatit ("Religious Zionism") alliance, with which Israel's extreme right has been represented in the governing coalition since 2022 and holds several ministerial posts.
Electoral lists create a joint list of candidates and later divide the seats in the Knesset among themselves. Alternatively, there are so-called surplus or residual vote agreements, in which the parties remain separate and pool their remaining votes for seat allocation. This form of cooperation is purely technical and serves to potentially gain an additional seat. The parties do not represent a common platform and do not have a joint list of candidates.
In the past, left-wing parties such as Avodah ("Labor Party") and Meretz ("Power") concluded such surplus agreements. A current example would be the cooperation of this kind between Likud and Religious Zionism.
Electoral alliances are an important means of increasing the chances of success for smaller parties in a highly fragmented party system. However, they are often unstable and frequently fall apart after an election.
Reprinted with kind permission of mena watch. First published on April 12, 2026 at www.mena-watch.com
This article first appeared in our newspaper "Israelaktuell," issue 145. You can order the newspaper here . We would also be happy to send you several copies for distribution.
