Israel's Deadlocked Election: Why the Market Backs Runner-Up Gadi Eisenkot for Prime Minister

Israel voted on 27 October, and nobody won. Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc took 53 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. The opposition alliance led by former army chief Gadi Eisenkot took 48. The two Arab-led parties took 19 — a record — and now hold the balance of power. A government needs 61 seats. Neither side is close, and the arithmetic has barely moved in ten days of counting, certifying, and arguing. Yet the prediction market has already made up its mind about who comes out on top: Polymarket gives Eisenkot a 59.7 percent chance of becoming the next prime minister, against 26 percent for Netanyahu. The man who finished second is the favourite. That is the story of this election in one number — and it is worth understanding, because the number is not really about who won. It is about who can still build something from the pieces.

The case for Eisenkot is not the seat count; it is the endorsements. On Thursday, Reuters reported that United Torah Judaism — one of Netanyahu's own longstanding allies — declined to recommend any candidate to form a government. On the same day, both Arab-led parties endorsed Eisenkot, giving him the backing of a comfortable majority of lawmakers. The 67 seats held by parties opposed to Netanyahu are not a coalition — they are a majority that agrees on almost nothing else — but for the purpose that matters this week, they are enough. President Isaac Herzog, who must choose who gets the first attempt at forming a government, has until 11 November to decide. The new Knesset is sworn in on 10 November. Whoever gets the mandate has 28 days, extendable by 14, to assemble 61 seats behind them.

The case against Eisenkot is a sentence everyone in the opposition has already said out loud. Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Liberman all campaigned on not governing with the Arab parties' support. Ra'am's leader, Mansour Abbas, has expressed doubts about backing a minority government from outside. The other route to 61 — bringing in the ultra-Orthodox parties — would mean abandoning the opposition's promise to end the military draft exemption, the issue that helped define the campaign. Netanyahu's argument writes itself: Likud is the largest party, he finished first, and a second election fought with a more consolidated right could turn out differently. As the pollster Mitchell Barak put it to Al Jazeera: "Essentially, we're both on track to a government, and nowhere near being able to form one."

So what is the market actually pricing? Not the election result — that is already counted. It is pricing the belief that endorsements, not seats, decide the mandate, and that a man who has never held political office can hold together a coalition whose members disagree about nearly everything except the man they want out. The volume backs the seriousness of the question: more than $1.1 million changed hands on this event in the last 24 hours, and $87.7 million in total. There is a counterweight worth noting: on Manifold, a small market asking whether Netanyahu will still be prime minister in 2027 trades near 73 percent — a reminder that "next prime minister" and "still prime minister" are different questions while a caretaker government sits in place. If nobody can form a government, Netanyahu stays on, and Israel votes again.

I am calling it for Eisenkot, at 55 percent — a shade below the market's 59.7. The endorsement arithmetic is real, and Herzog's decision next week is the first test: if the mandate goes to Eisenkot, the market's logic holds. But 55 is honest for a favourite whose path runs straight through promises his own allies have already made and may not be willing to break. If he fails, it will most likely be the old way: the pledges hold, the arithmetic does not, and the deadlock ends in a second election rather than a new prime minister. Whoever governs inherits more than a coalition puzzle — the fragile ceasefire with Iran, which I wrote about yesterday, and a war whose aftermath will define the next government whatever its shape. That is why this deadlock matters beyond Israel's borders, and why the next ten days, not the last ten, will decide it.