Netanyahu's Bloc Has 53 Seats and No Willing Partners. Eisenkot's Has 48 and One Uneasy Option.
Final results leave Netanyahu's bloc at 53 seats and Eisenkot's at 48, and every realistic path either man has to 61 runs through a partner who either will not take the job or has already been ruled out.
Final results give Netanyahu's bloc 53 seats and Gadi Eisenkot's core bloc 48, both short of the 61 needed to govern, and both facing the same mathematical problem from opposite directions: every realistic path to a majority runs through a partner that does not want the job or has already been ruled out.
Netanyahu's options narrow to almost nothing. Yisrael Beytenu's Avigdor Lieberman has said the only coalition he can imagine excludes Netanyahu entirely. The Democrats, led by Yair Golan, are a near impossibility for the same ideological reasons that kept them in opposition for the last two years. Naftali Bennett's Together floated a condition, an inquiry into 7 October, before backing away from it, leaving its position unclear rather than open. Even Yashar itself remains a remote option only because Eisenkot built his entire campaign on removing Netanyahu from office. That leaves the Arab-led lists, 19 seats between Ra'am and the Joint List, the one bloc that could carry Netanyahu past 61 and the one he has already called a shame and a disgrace and accused of stealing the election.
Eisenkot's math is less closed but not much more comfortable. A minority government, relying on other parties to support it in parliament without formally joining, is one path, and Ra'am's Mansour Abbas, who has sat in a coalition before, is willing again. The Joint List's Yousef Jabareen is not: he has said he would support such a government from outside, not join it, a position shaped by discomfort with the ongoing Gaza war rather than with Eisenkot himself. Peeling ultra-Orthodox parties away from Netanyahu's bloc is Eisenkot's other option, and in principle they are more open to him than to Likud, except that Eisenkot opposes the very exemptions from military service those parties exist to protect.
Both paths carry the same warning from recent history: the rotation agreement Netanyahu signed with Benny Gantz in 2020 collapsed within a year, and a minority government built on parties that will not join it is generally considered the more fragile arrangement of the two, not the sturdier one. Neither man has a majority. What they have instead are offers nobody has fully made and conditions nobody has fully accepted, and the government that eventually forms will be built out of whichever of those gaps closes first.
