Israel goes to the polls on October 27 in what may be its most consequential election in years - the first since October 7, the wars with Hamas and Hezbollah, and the seven-month conflict with Iran.
Yair Lapid © Mena Today
Israel goes to the polls on October 27 in what may be its most consequential election in years - the first since October 7, the wars with Hamas and Hezbollah, and the seven-month conflict with Iran.
And yet, for all the historical weight of the moment, the campaign has been strikingly, almost defiantly, empty of substance.
The candidates are, by now, familiar faces reshuffled into new configurations.
Benjamin Netanyahu leads Likud once again, flanked by Energy Minister Eli Cohen, Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana and Justice Minister Yariv Levin.
Notably, Yair Lapid has folded his centrist Yesh Atid into a joint ticket with former prime minister Naftali Bennett, merging their two parties into a single list called "Together," with Bennett at the helm.
The move, formalized in April, revives the same tactical alliance that unseated Netanyahu in 2021, and current polling has the combined list edging out Likud as the Knesset's largest party.
Beyond that, the field remains fractured: Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief of staff whose son and two nephews were killed in Gaza, is running with considerable public sympathy but little political experience; Benny Gantz leads Blue and White; Yair Golan heads the Democrats.
On the right sit Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party and Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit, alongside Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu. Thirty-eight lists in total were submitted to the Central Elections Committee.
What is largely absent from nearly all of them, is a plan.
Not one major party has put forward a serious economic platform addressing Israel's cost-of-living crisis or the handful of conglomerates that dominate its banking, food, telecom and energy sectors, concentration that successive state comptroller reports and OECD reviews have flagged for years as a structural driver of high prices.
Housing costs, food prices and the concentration of economic power that fuels both remain, once again, a campaign afterthought rather than a campaign issue, despite polling showing the economy consistently ranks among voters' top concerns.
No plan for the day after
Nor has any major list presented a coherent position on the future of the West Bank or on what comes next in Gaza once the current phase of fighting subsides. Annexation, a two-state horizon, indefinite occupation, a regional security arrangement, these questions, arguably the most consequential facing the country, are being left for another day, another government, another election.
Even Bennett and Lapid's alliance, marketed as a unifying, forward-looking bloc, has offered little beyond a promised state inquiry into October 7 and a universal conscription law, nothing resembling a strategic answer on Gaza or the West Bank.
It is against this backdrop that public disengagement has grown so pronounced.
A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 70 percent of Jewish Israelis are worried about the integrity of this election, a striking figure for a democracy under no acute external threat to its voting process.
Much of that disengagement is rooted in something simpler than institutional distrust: a widespread perception that the political class is, above all, protecting itself.
A Knesset member currently earns a gross monthly salary of roughly NIS 47,500 — about $14,000, while government ministers take home closer to $15,500, on top of a car and driver, housing and clothing allowances, and generous pension terms.
For voters struggling with rent and grocery bills, the optics of a political elite voting itself steady raises while offering no answer to their own economic anxiety is difficult to ignore.
An election in search of a reason
Israel's parliamentary system was built to force coalition-building around competing visions for the country.
What this campaign increasingly resembles is a contest over who gets to occupy the seats, rather than what anyone intends to do with them.
Surveys suggest no single party will win a majority, meaning the eventual government, as so often in Israel, will be determined less by any platform than by post-election horse-trading among smaller parties.
Voters, it seems, have already drawn their own conclusion: that whoever wins on October 27, very little about their daily lives is likely to change.
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