Recent polling puts economics and the cost of living at the top of the list of issues Israeli voters say matter most to them, ranking slightly above security and diplomacy. The numbers behind that anxiety are specific: food prices have risen 8 percent since 2024, the consumer price index is up 1.5 percent over the past year, and housing prices have more than doubled since 2011. Israeli students also posted their worst ever scores on international tests in math, science and English.
The exodus is not only of shoppers watching prices. 1,370 doctors left Israel between 2023 and 2025, roughly double the rate of a decade earlier, and close to 50,000 people have emigrated each year for three years running. None of these figures are secret, and none of them are driving the campaign message of any major party six weeks before the election.
Economist Manuel Trajtenberg put the current hierarchy plainly: what is most important are security and diplomatic issues, not the economic issue itself. Former lawmaker Rachel Azaria described a deeper disconnect, saying politics has detached from Israeli society, and that the expectation that government could actually address affordability has disappeared from how people vote at all.
That is a break from the recent past. Yesh Atid ran on the line where's the money and won 19 seats in 2013. Kulanu built ten seats out of affordability alone in 2015. Housing protests in 2011 pulled hundreds of thousands into the streets over rent. Each of those was a moment when a cost of living complaint turned directly into a ballot result. Nearly 60 percent of Israelis say they feel positive about their own personal situation even now, which may be part of the answer: an anxiety that is real in the aggregate and bearable individually is a harder thing for any party to campaign on than a security threat is.