Israeli Election Special: Winners, losers, and indecision

On Tuesday, October 27th, Israelis went to the polls to vote in legislative elections.

This vote will decide the makeup of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and ultimately who will be in the government of the day and the prime minister.

The last election was held in 2022, and this is the first time that an Israeli parliament has completed its term since 1988.

We are anticipating the full results later on today.

You'll have them by the time you're hearing this.

But at the time of recording, we have 94% of the vote counted.

And while Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party has secured the most number of seats, neither his bloc nor the opposition bloc has so far managed to secure a majority in Parliament.

In short, so far, no clear result, but a lot to talk about.

Olly...

Going back a bit to sort of work out where we came from, the campaigns, there were frontrunners, I'm sure.

So just who were the frontrunners?

There were frontrunners.

And of course, for much of the campaigning period, it was Gadi Eisenkot, the head of Yashar, leading the change bloc, the anti-Netanyahu bloc.

So the average final polling between the blocs just before the election day was that the change bloc, Eisenkot's bloc, was going to get 54 votes, seats rather.

Netanyahu's bloc would get 50 seats.

And the Palestinian parties, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, would have 16 seats.

So

no one had a majority? No

one was polling to have a majority throughout the election period.

Okay.

And but it's worth noting, I think, before we get on to the actual sort of results, of course, who the blocs are made up of.

So Eisenhower obviously is the head of Yashar and he was joined by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett together.

That's a joint alliance.

list between the two.

Then you have Yair Golan's The Democrats.