Most polls indicate that more than ten mandates’ worth of soft-right voters, who in the 2022 elections mostly voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party, seek to vote for another right-wing alternative.
The Netanyahu bloc fears a scenario in which former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who currently receives twenty seats in the polls and thus serves as a “parking lot” for those “parked” voters, will once again use the votes of right-wing voters to form a government with the Left and the Arabs. In order to prevent this, the option of establishing a new right-wing party was raised. The idea is that the new party will be composed of figures who were not directly or indirectly involved in the failure of October 7. This will help “drink” Bennett’s votes and ensure a victory of the right-wing bloc in the 2026 elections.
However, past experience shows that while new right-wing parties were founded with the hope of significant electoral success, they ended in major failure at the ballot box. The first attempt to establish a right-wing party competing with Likud was in 1979. Following their opposition to the handover of Sinai territories to Egypt as part of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, Likud defectors founded the Tehiya Party. But it achieved the disappointing result of only three seats in the 1981 elections.
In the 1988 elections, there were already three right-wing parties competing with Likud: Besides Tehiya, these were Moledet, led by Rehavam Ze’evi, which called for the voluntary transfer of Arabs from Israel and the territories, and Tzomet, led by former Chief of staff Rafael Eitan, which sought to gain the support of secular right-wing voters. But even then, the result was disappointing. Tehiya won three seats, while Moledet and Tzomet won two each.
Later, in the 1992 elections, while Tehiya came to the end of its political career after failing to pass the threshold, and Moledet strengthened slightly to three seats, it was the Tzomet Party that surprised with eight seats.
Attempts to challenge Likud at the elections
Another attempt to establish a right-wing party to challenge the Likud was in the 1999 elections. Likud and Mafdal defectors led by Benny Begin, who opposed the Netanyahu government’s decision to sign the Hebron Agreement and the Wye Memorandum, established the National Union Party. This time, expectations were also high, but on the ballot, the result was again disappointing with only four seats.
The conclusion was that the Likud could not be challenged from the right side of the political spectrum, but only from the opposite direction.
The establishment of the centrist Kadima Party in the 2006 elections by Ariel Sharon and almost half of the members of the Likud faction illustrated this well. The new party managed to take many votes from Likud voters in the 2003 elections. Kadima won 29 seats, while the Likud collapsed from 38 seats to only 12. However, in the 2009 elections, right-wing voters returned to Likud, which rose to 27 seats, while Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni, was based mainly on center-left voters.
The last two politicians who tried to challenge Netanyahu and the Likud were Bennett and Gideon Sa’ar. At certain moments, it seemed that they might be a governing alternative to Netanyahu and the Likud, but at the ballot box the result was again disappointing. After leading the religious Zionist camp for two election campaigns (2013 and 2015), Bennett tried his luck by founding the New Right Party (which later changed its name to Yamina). But the new party was 1,500 votes short of passing the threshold in the 2019 elections.
Later, during the COVID-19 crisis, Bennett’s reputation rose, as he was perceived by the Israeli public as the most prominent critic of the Netanyahu-Gantz government’s policies. In October 2020, polls predicted that Bennett and Yamina would win 23 seats, only three fewer than Netanyahu and the Likud.
Yet, Bennett’s rise in the polls was quickly damaged when, in early December, Sa’ar announced the establishment of the new right-wing party, New Hope. It initially received 18 seats, mainly at the expense of Yamina, which crashed to 13. However, in the 2021 elections, the result was very disappointing for both: Bennett won only seven seats, while Sa’ar received only six.
However, despite the disappointment at the ballot box, the two took solace in the fact that they managed to send Netanyahu and the right-wing parties into opposition for a short time. If it weren’t for the support of both Yamina and New Hope, a government would not have been formed with the center-left parties and Ra’am, in which Bennett served as prime minister and Sa’ar as justice minister.
In conclusion, many have tried unsuccessfully to challenge Netanyahu and the Likud from the Right. Alongside unifying the religious Zionist parties and preventing the loss of votes in the right-wing bloc, the goal now needs to be more modest. The main goal of the new right-wing party will be to take voters from Bennett’s current electorate.
This will ensure that after the elections, the right-wing bloc will have a majority to establish a broad Zionist government without the left-wing parties and the joint Arab list.
The writer is a lecturer and research fellow at the University of South Wales, UK. He is the author of Collapse: Israeli Labor Party 1992-2024.