As Candidate Lists Lock In, Eisenkot Looks to Win Power Through the Heart of Old Likud

With the September deadline for submitting final candidate lists now passed and 38 parties registered for Israel's October 27 election, the race's center of gravity is increasingly settling on Gadi Eisenkot's new Yashar party, which some polling suggests could end up as the Knesset's largest single party, The Times of Israel reported.

Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, has pitched Yashar as offering what he calls a different version of the Israeli right, one without the current government's dependencies and controversies. His candidate list leans heavily on security officials and former civil servants, with religious Zionist figures disproportionately represented near the top, a signal that the party is chasing rightward-leaning voters rather than trying to win over the traditional left.

That strategy leaves Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud in an uncomfortable spot: the bloc he has long led has no clear, obvious path to the 61 seats needed to govern on its own. Meanwhile, the parties trying to unseat him, including Yashar, Naftali Bennett's B'Yachad, the Democrats and Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu, have worked out vote-sharing arrangements despite real ideological differences between them.

The result is a political map that looks largely unchanged on paper from recent elections, but with Eisenkot's entry threatening to pull right-leaning voters away from Likud specifically, rather than from the opposition bloc trying to replace Netanyahu.