How Israeli coalition math actually works

The Knesset has 120 seats, and it takes 61 to form a government, full stop. There's no separate executive election. Israel votes for party lists nationwide under pure proportional representation, and whichever combination of parties can sign onto a coalition adding up to 61 gets to govern. ¹

The catch is the 3.25% threshold. Any party that doesn't clear 3.25% of the national vote gets zero seats, and every ballot cast for it is simply discarded, no ranked-choice backup, no redistribution. The bar has been 3.25% since the 2015 election, raised from 2% before that, and it now takes roughly four seats' worth of votes just to clear it. The number of votes thrown out this way has grown over the last three decades as the threshold climbed. ¹

Parties that can't clear the bar alone sometimes merge into a joint list, the way several Arab parties won 13 seats together as the Joint List despite some individual members polling below 3.25% on their own. Short of a full merger, two parties can sign a surplus vote agreement: if neither's leftover votes add up to a full seat on their own, the agreement lets their surpluses combine, and the extra seat goes to whichever of the two has the bigger leftover. It's a hedge against wasted votes in a system that otherwise just throws them away. ¹

Heading into the October 2026 election, neither bloc is there. Netanyahu's coalition is polling around 50 seats; the opposition bloc led by his main rival is polling closer to 58 to 60, short of 61 either way. That's what makes Ra'am, the Arab party currently polling five to seven seats, a potential kingmaker again, the way it was in 2021, when the coalition it backed became the first in Israeli history to take office with an Arab party's support. A Channel 13 poll found Ra'am's seat count could rise from five to seven, gaining six Arab-voter seats and one Jewish-voter seat, if Yoav Segalovitz, a Yesh Atid MK and former deputy minister of internal security, joined the party, a shift one pollster said could lift the opposition bloc to 62 or 63 seats. ²