Four of Israel's main opposition parties signed surplus vote agreements on Thursday ahead of the 27 October election, pairing Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar with Yair Golan's Democrats, and Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu with B'Yachad, the combined list led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. Each pair still runs as separate parties on the ballot. The agreement only pools whatever votes are left over after seats are allocated, so votes that would otherwise be wasted count toward the partner party instead.
A Channel 12 poll gives Yashar 25 seats, four more than Likud, with B'Yachad at 13, the Democrats at 10 and Yisrael Beytenu at 9, putting the combined opposition bloc at 57 seats in that survey. Other polls have the two blocs closer, tied around 52 or 53 seats each, which is the gap these agreements are designed to close on the margins rather than settle outright.
A parallel move may be forming on the Arab political side. Ra'am and the Joint List, the Hadash, Ta'al and Balad alliance, are polling at a combined 11 to 14 seats, and Ta'al leader Ahmad Tibi has signalled he intends to sign a surplus agreement with Ra'am, though that pairing is not yet confirmed.
Netanyahu responded to the four party arrangement by saying it proves his rivals will form a left wing government, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich made the same argument in his own words. Neither addressed the mechanism itself, which does not create a joint government, only a more efficient way of not losing seats to the electoral threshold. What the agreements prove is narrower than what Netanyahu is claiming: that four parties agree on how to count votes, not on who governs with them.