Backtalk CHRISTOPHER RUDDY / PUBLISHER I Don’t Count Bibi Out
f you read the headlines about this month’s Israeli election, you might conclude Benjamin Netan- yahu is fi nished. Don’t bet on it.
Israelis are scheduled to vote on Oct. 27, and recent polls
certainly show trouble for Netanyahu. A Channel 12 survey reported by The Jerusalem Post has
former Israel Defense Forces chief Gadi Eisenkot’s new Yas- har party at 24 Knesset seats, Netanyahu’s Likud at 22, and Naftali Bennett’s B’Yachad at 15. In a direct question about suitability for prime minister,
Eisenkot led Netanyahu 44% to 34%. Those numbers are real. But they can also be deceiving. Israel does not have an American-style presidential sys-
tem. Israelis do not directly elect a prime minister. Instead, they elect a 120-member Knesset through nationwide proportional representation, and it takes a governing coalition controlling at least 61 seats to produce a government. That distinction is critical. Israel’s political system refl ects the extraordinary diver-
sity of the country built after 1948 — immigrants from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and eventually the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia; secular and religious Jews; Arabs; and communities speaking diff erent languages and carrying very diff erent political traditions. The proportional parliamentary system adopted by Isra- el’s founders allowed relatively small political movements to gain representation. Netanyahu has mastered it better than anyone. He is not
simply another Israeli politician. He is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history. And his political durability rests on something opinion
polls asking whether voters “like” Netanyahu can miss: the strength of Israel’s broader right-religious electorate. Likud, the party transformed into a governing force by Menachem Begin, built a powerful coalition among voters who felt ignored by Israel’s old Labor establishment. It devel- oped especially deep support among Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews whose families came from Arab and Muslim countries. Over the past two decades, Israel itself has also moved
signifi cantly to the right on security. Demographics matter as well. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox population is growing much faster than the non-Haredi Jew- ish population. It means that religious parties — which have frequently been Netanyahu’s coalition partners — represent an increasingly important component of Israeli politics. This is why the question “How popular is Bibi?” is often the wrong question.
106 NEWSMAX | OCTOBER 2026 The better question is: Can anybody assemble 61 Knesset
members without him? Netanyahu understands this arithmetic perfectly. He has repeatedly warned voters on the right that sup-
porting small parties can inadvertently help his opponents if those parties fail to clear the electoral threshold. That is not merely campaign rhetoric. Israel’s system
can eff ectively erase the votes cast for parties that fall below the threshold. The same phenomenon helped produce Netanyahu’s remarkable 2022 comeback. His Likud won 32 seats. Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid won 24. But Netanyahu’s right-wing and religious partners
brought his bloc to 64 seats — three more than necessary for control of the Knesset. (And, by the way, polls back then had him losing the election.) Netanyahu’s political obituary has been written count-
less times. The latest polls clearly show Netanyahu facing a diffi cult election. Indeed, The Jerusalem Post reported that most of six recent
surveys it reviewed had Eisenkot’s Yashar ahead of Likud. One Channel 13 poll put Yashar at 26 seats and Likud at 23. But even those polls demonstrate the central problem
facing Netanyahu’s opponents: Winning more seats than Likud is not the same thing as forming a government. One recent Channel 12 poll put the current coalition-
aligned bloc at 50 seats, the opposition at 59, and Arab par- ties at 11. That is a bad poll for Netanyahu. It is not necessarily a
road map for removing him. To do that, parties that disagree profoundly on secu-
rity, religion, settlements, judicial policy, and the Palestin- ian question may have to cooperate — directly or indirect- ly — around a common objective of denying Netanyahu another government. Israel has seen that movie before. There is another revealing anecdote. When President Donald Trump reportedly asked Netan-
yahu in the Oval Offi ce in July how he was doing in the election, a Netanyahu adviser interjected: “Mr. President, he is winning.” Perhaps that was political bravado. But after three decades of Netanyahu comebacks, it
would be foolish to dismiss it. For 30 years, nobody in Israeli politics has played that
game more successfully than Benjamin Netanyahu. Count Bibi out at your own risk.
Christopher Ruddy is CEO of Newsmax Media.
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