# Herzog Vows to Prevent a Fifth Election, and the Opposition Is Already Pushing Back > President Herzog says he will do everything he can to build a stable government and stop Israel from repeating the four elections of 2019 to 2021, and within a day Yair Lapid was warning him against engineering a fake unity government with Netanyahu. - Source: Israel Today - Canonical URL: https://israeltoday.news/article/herzog-stable-government-no-repeat-elections - Author: Noa Bar-Lev - Section: Politics - Published: 2026-10-12T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-12T15:00:00.000Z - Tags: Herzog, Elections, Coalition --- President Isaac Herzog told a Yedioth Ahronoth conference that he would do everything he can to help Israel form a stable government after the 27 October election, and said he will truly do all he can so there will not be repeat elections, because the country's national challenges are enormous. The pledge reaches back to 2019 and 2021, when Israel held four election rounds before a coalition finally held together, a government that itself lasted only until late 2022. Opposition leader Yair Lapid, now second on Naftali Bennett's Together list, did not wait to see what shape Herzog's effort might take. He posted that he very much hopes the president will not try to push for another fake unity government, a direct warning against any arrangement that keeps Netanyahu in office under a different label. Benny Gantz, heading Blue and White, argued the opposite case the same day, that only a Zionist unity government spanning both camps can deal with Iran, with conscription of the ultra-Orthodox, and with mending the rifts in Israeli society. The same word, unity, is being used by Lapid as a warning and by Gantz as a solution, a sign of how unsettled the question of what comes after 27 October already is before a single vote is counted. Herzog's own role gives the pledge some weight beyond rhetoric. After an election with no outright winner, it is the president who formally asks a party leader to try to form a government, the same mechanism that produced four attempts between 2019 and 2021 before one succeeded. With polling still showing neither the governing coalition nor the opposition bloc able to reach a majority alone, the question Herzog says he wants to avoid, who gets the mandate and what they build with it, may end up being his to answer again. --- Originally published by Israel Today. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://israeltoday.news/article/herzog-stable-government-no-repeat-elections.