Herzog Opens Coalition Talks as Israel’s Election Fraud Claims Collapse and Netanyahu’s Future Hangs in the Balance

Israel’s President Isaac Herzog formally accepted the certified results of last week’s parliamentary election on Wednesday and opened two days of consultations that will decide who gets the first chance to form the country’s next government, hours after the Central Elections Committee demolished claims by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies that the vote had been stolen. The committee said a review of all 9,069 polling stations had found no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or changed its outcome, according to the Press Association, dealing a decisive blow to weeks of unsubstantiated fraud allegations and clearing the way for the most consequential coalition contest in Israel in years.

Herzog began meeting the eleven factions elected to the 120-seat Knesset on Wednesday evening, starting with the smallest parties and working upwards in an unusual break from tradition, and will conclude on Thursday night with the two largest — Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party and Netanyahu’s Likud. Within seven days of the official results, a deadline that falls on 11 November, the president must task one member of the Knesset with forming a government. Whoever he chooses will then have 28 days, with a possible extension of fourteen more, to assemble a coalition commanding at least 61 seats. Neither of the two rival blocs has one.

The arithmetic is stark. Netanyahu’s religious-nationalist bloc won 53 seats in the 27 October election, down from 68 in the outgoing Knesset and eight short of a majority, while the opposition alliance led by Eisenkot, the former military chief, won 48. The remaining 19 seats belong to the two Arab-led parties — eleven for the Joint List and eight for Ra’am — a record haul that has made them the kingmakers of Israeli politics, and the central dilemma of the coalition talks. Likud, with 27 seats, remains the largest single party; Yashar, with 21, is the largest in the opposition camp. No combination that excludes the Arab parties reaches 61 without defections, and no combination that includes them is yet agreed by anyone.

“The review found no evidence of irregularities that compromised the integrity of the election or affected its results,” the elections committee said in a statement on Wednesday, according to the Press Association. Dean Livne, the committee’s acting director, said its investigation had examined every complaint “individually and thoroughly” but found no evidence to support allegations that the election results were invalid, and that the results “accurately reflect the choices voters made at the ballot box”. The committee’s head, Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, warned at the official results ceremony at the president’s residence that those casting doubt on the election results posed “a real danger” to Israel’s democracy, Al Jazeera reported.

A separate investigation by the Shin Bet intelligence service into allegations of foreign interference in the election is still under way, according to a spokesperson for the elections committee. But the committee said it did not believe any such interference had affected the results, and Justice Sohlberg said on Sunday that even if the suspicions were substantiated, “this would not undermine the integrity of the electoral process or the election results as a whole”. Police have investigated allegations of irregularities involving votes for Arab parties and dismissed the claims, according to reporting cited by Al Jazeera.

The fraud claims that did not survive scrutiny

Netanyahu and his supporters have repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims that Arab-led parties had “stolen” the election, possibly with foreign assistance, the Press Association reported. On Monday, Netanyahu posted on X that “the public in Israel does not want a government that depends on Ra’am and the Joint List — parties that support terrorism and reject the existence of the Jewish state”, according to Fox News Digital. Likud has at times floated refusing to recognise the results over its claims about the Arab vote, Al Jazeera reported, claims that police investigated and discounted.

The committee’s findings close that avenue, at least as a matter of fact. What they do not close is the political argument Netanyahu is making alongside it: that a government dependent on Arab parties would be illegitimate in substance even if the vote itself was sound. That distinction — between challenging the count and challenging the coalition arithmetic it produced — is the ground on which the next weeks of Israeli politics will be fought, and it is why the president’s consultations matter more than usual.

Herzog’s decision to hear the smallest factions first is itself a signal. In previous rounds of consultations, presidents have typically begun with the largest parties. By starting with Religious Zionism-Zehut at 5pm on Wednesday, followed by Shas at 6.15pm and Yisrael Beytenu at 7.30pm, and ending on Thursday evening with Yashar at 7.15pm and Likud at 8.30pm, Herzog is hearing the kingmakers and the potential defectors before he hears the two men competing for the mandate. The recommendations the parties give him are not binding, the Jerusalem Post reported: the president may pick whoever he judges has the best chance of forming a government. But the order in which he listens tells its own story about where the power in this Knesset actually sits.

Opposition unites behind Eisenkot — with conditions that may exclude the kingmakers

On Tuesday, five opposition leaders met in Herzliya in their first joint gathering since the election and agreed to recommend Eisenkot to President Herzog as the candidate to form Israel’s next government. Eisenkot, the head of the Yashar party, was joined by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman and Democrats chairman Yair Golan. The meeting’s statement said the leaders were coordinated and would “act immediately” to replace what they called the “Oct. 7 government” with a national emergency government, and instructed their negotiating teams to begin preparing coalition agreements and policy guidelines.

The five leaders also endorsed four principles set out by Eisenkot: that every party in a government must recognise Israel as a Jewish state, label Hamas a terrorist group, accept national service and conscription obligations, and back the elimination of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in Gaza. Al Jazeera described those conditions as ones that “could exclude some Arab-led parties”, and the opposition bloc remains divided over whether to rely on Arab-led parties for support at all. That division is the central weakness of the opposition’s position, and the reason the race for the mandate is far from settled despite the opposition’s public unity.

The Joint List, the larger of the two Arab-led parties with eleven seats, has said it will not join any government. Ra’am, with eight seats, has not signed a deal with anyone. A source in the Joint List told Fox News Digital that the alliance was likely to endorse Eisenkot to be the first lawmaker tasked with forming a government — an endorsement of a candidate is not the same as joining his coalition, and the distinction matters. Eisenkot’s bloc holds 48 seats. Even with the two Arab parties’ nineteen, the total would be 67 — but only if all nineteen backed him in a confidence vote, and only if his own five-party alliance holds together through the compromises that such support would demand.

Netanyahu, meanwhile, has called for a broad national government under his own leadership and has ruled out a coalition with Arab-majority lists. No opposition leader has expressed openness to joining him, Al Jazeera reported. His bloc holds 53 seats and would need eight more from somewhere. The parties he has not ruled out — the ultra-Orthodox factions and the smaller right-wing parties — are already counted in his 53. The arithmetic leaves him hunting for defectors from the opposition camp, a prospect his rivals have publicly dismissed, or for a unity arrangement that the opposition has so far refused.

Netanyahu’s narrowing options

For Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history, the stakes of this round are personal as well as political. He remains prime minister in a caretaker capacity until a new government is sworn in, and he continues to argue that Likud’s first-place finish with 27 seats gives him the mandate to lead the next government. “A clear majority in the Jewish public chose the Likud as the largest party and me, as prime minister, to lead the next government,” he said in a statement quoted by Fox News Digital. “We aspire to form a broad government with our partners and with any party that wishes to do so and does not support terrorism. I am open to holding discussions on the matter.”

But the claim to a mandate from a first-place finish is not the same as a path to 61 seats, and Netanyahu’s opponents know it. His bloc lost fifteen seats in the election, falling from 68 to 53, and the opposition’s 48 seats plus the Arab parties’ nineteen give his rivals a theoretical combined total of 67 — enough, in principle, to remove him and to pass legislation against his interests. The new Knesset is scheduled to be sworn in on 10 November, and according to the Congressional Research Service, its newly elected members could begin forming committees and advancing legislation while the current prime minister and ministers remain in office under the oversight of the new parliament. That means Netanyahu’s opponents may be able to act in parliament even before they succeed in forming a government.

There is a further complication that no other candidate faces. Netanyahu has a longstanding request for a pardon in his ongoing corruption trial pending before President Herzog, the same president who must now decide who receives the mandate to form a government. Netanyahu denies all charges in the trial. The pardon request adds a layer of political sensitivity to every decision Herzog makes in this process, and to every claim Netanyahu makes about the legitimacy of the outcome. His allies have argued that the request is a separate matter; his critics say it is impossible to separate the two, and that a caretaker prime minister seeking a pardon from the president who is also choosing the next prime minister is a conflict that colours the whole contest.

The Associated Press reported on Monday, citing two regional officials and a person familiar with the matter, that Netanyahu has been pressing President Donald Trump to launch another military offensive against Iran as the election deadlock threatens his hold on power. The report adds a foreign-policy dimension to a domestic crisis: a caretaker prime minister, weakened at home, is reported to be urging action abroad at the very moment the United States is weighing whether to return to war with Iran. Trump told the Financial Times on Tuesday that the United States has “no immediate plan” to strike Iran, a statement reported by Reuters, and the war that began in February has already cost more than 1,700 civilian lives in Iran according to the Human Rights Activists in Iran group, cited by Al Jazeera. Whether Netanyahu’s reported pressure changes Washington’s calculation is unknown; that he is reported to be applying it at all is itself a measure of how precarious his position has become.

What the election actually decided

The 27 October election was fought in the shadow of two wars and a ceasefire. The war in Gaza, which began with the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023, reached a ceasefire in October 2025, and the war with Iran that began on 28 February 2026 has dominated Israeli politics ever since, reshaping the country’s security debate and its relationship with the United States. Voters delivered a verdict that was unmistakable in direction and ambiguous in outcome: they took Netanyahu’s majority away, they gave the opposition its best result in years, and they gave the Arab parties their strongest position in the history of the Knesset — without giving anyone the ability to govern alone.

That is not a new condition for Israel. The country held four elections in two years between 2019 and 2021, when a similar deadlock produced repeated rounds of voting and a series of short-lived coalitions. The system — a single nationwide proportional list, a 3.25 per cent threshold, and a 120-seat Knesset in which no party has ever won a majority on its own — makes coalition-building the ordinary business of Israeli politics. What is different this time is the composition of the deadlock. The Arab parties have never before held nineteen seats, and they have never before been the hinge on which the formation of a government turns. The Joint List’s refusal to join any government, and Ra’am’s silence, mean that the hinge may not swing in either direction.

Eisenkot himself is a figure shaped by the security establishment rather than by party politics. A former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, he entered politics as a centrist and built Yashar into the largest opposition party, winning 21 seats in its first election under his leadership. His four principles for a government — recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, the designation of Hamas as a terrorist group, national service and conscription, and the elimination of Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in Gaza — are designed to be acceptable to the widest possible range of partners, from the secular right to the centre-left. Whether they are acceptable to the Arab parties whose votes he may need is the question that will decide his candidacy.

Bennett, who served as prime minister in the short-lived coalition of 2021-2022, brings the experience of having assembled a government from an equally fragmented Knesset, and of having watched it collapse within a year. Lapid, the outgoing opposition leader and another former prime minister, brings the institutional weight of the largest centre-left tradition in Israeli politics. Liberman, who leads Yisrael Beytenu and has been a kingmaker in several previous rounds, brings seven seats and a reputation for hard bargaining. Golan, who chairs the Democrats, brings the left flank of the alliance. The five men have agreed on a candidate; they have not yet agreed on the price of the votes they still need.

Analysis: Why It Matters

The fraud claims collapsed — and that matters more than the seat count

The most important event of Wednesday was not the opening of the consultations but the committee’s finding that preceded them. Netanyahu’s camp spent a week suggesting, without evidence, that Arab-led parties had stolen the election with foreign help, and at times floated refusing to recognise the results. The committee’s review of all 9,069 polling stations, its examination of every complaint individually, and Justice Sohlberg’s warning that doubting the results poses “a real danger” to democracy together amount to an institutional rebuke of a kind Israel’s electoral system rarely has to deliver. Democracies are tested less by the elections they hold than by what losing parties do afterwards, and on that test the system held: the count was certified, the claims were answered with evidence, and the process moved on to the business of forming a government. That the Shin Bet investigation into foreign interference continues is a reminder that the underlying anxieties are real; that the committee said even substantiated suspicions would not undermine the integrity of the results is a reminder that the institutions know the difference between interference and outcome.

Herzog’s order of business is a message in itself

Presidents in Israel are supposed to be above the fray, and Herzog’s choice to hear the smallest parties first is the most quietly consequential decision of the week. By listening to Religious Zionism-Zehut, Shas and Yisrael Beytenu before he listens to Likud and Yashar, he is gathering the recommendations of the parties whose support will actually decide the outcome before he hears the pitches of the two men competing for the job. It also means that by the time Netanyahu and Eisenkot sit down with him on Thursday evening, the president will already know what the smaller parties are prepared to accept and what they are not. The recommendations are not binding, but a president who has heard the kingmakers first is a president who is harder to mislead about the arithmetic. In a process where the difference between the two blocs is five seats and the difference between a government and a new election is eight, that discipline matters.

Eisenkot’s 48 seats are closer than they look — and further than they look

On paper, the opposition is five seats behind Netanyahu’s bloc and thirteen short of a majority, while the Arab parties’ nineteen seats would carry it past 61 with room to spare. In practice, the distance is greater, because Eisenkot’s own four principles may exclude the very parties whose votes he needs. A government that requires its members to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, label Hamas a terrorist group, accept conscription and back the elimination of Hamas’s capabilities in Gaza is a government that the Joint List, which has said it will not join any government at all, is unlikely to support even from outside. Ra’am has not ruled anything out, but eight seats are not nineteen, and 48 plus eight is 56 — still five short. Eisenkot’s path to 61 therefore requires either a change in the Arab parties’ position, a change in his own principles, or defections from the right. None of the three is impossible, and none of them is close.

Netanyahu’s problem is not that he lost — it is that he has nowhere left to go

Netanyahu remains the leader of the largest party and the incumbent prime minister, and in most parliamentary systems those two facts would make him the favourite to form a government. In this Knesset they do not, because every party he has not ruled out is already in his 53, and every party he would need to reach 61 is either in the opposition or has ruled him out. His call for a broad national government under his leadership is an appeal to a unity that the opposition has rejected, and his rejection of the Arab parties closes the only door that arithmetic leaves open. The pardon request compounds the difficulty: it gives his critics a reason to treat every move he makes as self-interested, and it gives the president a reason to be seen to be even-handed in a process where even-handedness is itself a political act. A caretaker prime minister who is reported to be pressing Washington for a new war with Iran while his domestic position collapses is a leader whose options are narrowing in every direction at once.

The region is watching a deadlock it cannot afford

Israel’s coalition crisis is not a domestic affair. The war with Iran, which began in February and has already seen strikes on Iranian nuclear and missile sites, attacks on Gulf shipping and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, is unresolved, and the United States is openly debating whether to return to it. A caretaker government in Jerusalem, led by a prime minister whose mandate is contested and whose political survival depends on events he does not control, is a poor position from which to make decisions about war and peace. The Gaza ceasefire, the hostage question, the future of the West Bank and the relationship with Washington all require a government with the authority to commit Israel to a course of action. Until Herzog’s consultations produce one, Israel will be governed by a prime minister whom a majority of the Knesset did not vote for, in a country whose voters have told him, in the clearest terms the system allows, that they want a change.

What to Watch Next

1. Thursday’s consultations: Herzog meets the remaining factions, ending with Yashar at 7.15pm and Likud at 8.30pm. The recommendations the parties give — and whether the Arab parties recommend anyone at all — will shape the president’s choice.
2. The mandate decision, due by 11 November: Herzog must task a member of the Knesset with forming a government within seven days of the official results. The choice between Netanyahu and Eisenkot will be the most consequential decision of his presidency.
3. The 28-day clock: Whoever receives the mandate will have 28 days, with a possible fourteen-day extension, to build a coalition of 61. The first test will be whether Eisenkot’s principles survive contact with the Arab parties, or whether Netanyahu can find defectors.
4. The new Knesset, sworn in on 10 November: The opposition’s combined 67 seats, including the Arab parties, could allow it to act in parliament — forming committees and advancing legislation — even before a government is formed.
5. The Shin Bet findings: The intelligence service’s investigation into alleged foreign interference in the election is ongoing. Its conclusions, and whether they substantiate any of the claims Netanyahu’s camp has made, will shape the legitimacy debate that follows the coalition talks.

Sources

• Glasgow Times (Press Association) — Israel’s president accepts certified election results ahead of government talks
• Al Jazeera (via 234Radio) — Israel vote results confirmed as election commission rejects fraud claims
• Asia Today — Eisenkot mandate talks near as opposition unites behind him
• Crisis Zone — Israeli opposition leaders back Eisenkot for first mandate to form a government
• Zee News — Israel election commission finds no fraud in polls, rejects Netanyahu’s claims of vote theft