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For the first time in years, Benjamin Netanyahu is not the man Israel's president turned to first. On Saturday 7 November, President Isaac Herzog asked Gadi Eisenkot, leader of the Yashar party, to try to form the country's next government — a decision that hands the former military chief of staff the opening move in one of the most delicate coalition puzzles Israeli politics has produced in a decade.
The formal ceremony takes place on Sunday 8 November at 5pm local time. From that moment, the clock starts ticking. Eisenkot has 28 days to assemble a coalition, with a possible 14-day extension if he can show real progress. If he succeeds, Israel gets a government led by a man who has never held the prime minister's office. If he fails, the country slides back toward the uncertainty it has lived with for much of the past few years.
The numbers behind Herzog's choice
Herzog's decision was not a close call in the arithmetic that matters most. According to reports from Al Jazeera, 67 members of the Knesset recommended Eisenkot for the task, against 46 who backed Netanyahu. In a 120-seat parliament, that is a clear presidential signal — even though the election itself told a more complicated story.
The vote on 27 October 2026 produced no winner. Netanyahu's Likud emerged as the single largest party with 27 seats, six more than Eisenkot's Yashar. But Israeli elections are not decided by who finishes first. They are decided by who can gather 61 seats — an absolute majority — into a working coalition. On that test, the bloc of lawmakers willing to recommend Eisenkot was the larger one, and Herzog followed the numbers. As NPR reported, the president's task is to identify the candidate with the best realistic chance of building a majority, not simply to crown the biggest party.
That distinction matters. Netanyahu remains a formidable negotiator with long experience of stitching together coalitions from unlikely parts. Eisenkot, by contrast, must now prove he can do the same thing from the other side of the aisle — and do it within four weeks.
The red line that narrows the maths
Eisenkot's path to 61 seats is real, but it is narrow, and he has already drawn a line that makes it narrower still. He has ruled out governing with the Arab-led parties, closing off one route to a majority before negotiations have even begun. That decision may reassure parts of his own camp and potential partners on the right, but it means every seat he needs must come from Jewish parties across a fractured political map — and several of those parties spent the campaign attacking each other.
The negotiations will therefore be less about policy manifestos and more about the oldest currencies in Israeli politics: ministries, budgets, and guarantees on the issues — security, the cost of living, the future of the judiciary — that split the country down the middle. Eisenkot's pitch, implicitly, is stability after years of political churn. His problem is that the parties he needs have heard that pitch before, from other leaders, and extracted a high price for believing it.
What happens if he fails
The rules here are clear. If Eisenkot cannot present a government within his 28 days — plus any extension Herzog grants — the president can nominate another candidate to try. That would almost certainly mean Netanyahu getting his own turn, armed with the argument that he warned all along that only he could build a coalition.
If that second attempt also fails, Israel heads for yet another election within 90 days, with Netanyahu remaining as caretaker prime minister in the meantime. For a country that has already endured repeated rounds of voting in recent years, that is the outcome almost everyone in the Knesset claims to want to avoid — which is precisely why the next four weeks will be the most intensely negotiated in Israeli politics for some time.
The ceremony on Sunday is only the starting gun. The real test begins the moment Eisenkot sits down with the party leaders who endorsed him and discovers whether their recommendations were a genuine commitment — or merely a message to Netanyahu that his time may, at last, be running out. For more on how elections elsewhere are redrawing power this month, see our explainers on the Democrats winning back the House and the Democrats flipping the Senate.