Okay, so before we get into this, I want to note that you've been staring at that same page for twenty minutes.
I've been reading. There's a difference between staring and reading, and the difference is that I'm retaining things.
You've turned the page twice. I counted.
That's because the second page was a table of polling data and I was absorbing it. Anyway, Daniel wrote in, and this one's a big one.
It is. Here's what he sent. He wants to talk about the history of the center and the center-left in the Israeli political spectrum as we gear up for the election. His framing is that as politics gets more polarized around the world, more fire gets fought at the margins, and Israel is significant because of the sheer plurality of its parties, which he calls both a feature and part of the system. Then he asks the real question underneath all of it. Could pragmatic parties, ones that cater to the neglected everyday stuff, cost of living, cost of real estate, among others, be the fulcrum the upcoming election turns on? And could that reshape Israeli politics away from the divisive Netanyahu-era governments toward something new?
That's four or five questions wearing one coat.
It is. And they're good ones, because the answers don't all point the same direction. You can have a country where voters say the economy is their top concern and still get a campaign about everything except the economy.
Which is exactly what's happening. Israel votes on the twenty-seventh of October. First election since October seventh, twenty twenty-three, and the first Knesset since nineteen eighty-eight to actually serve a full four-year term. It dissolved on the seventeenth of July.
So there's a real baseline here. Voters have had four years of an actual government, not a snap election every eighteen months. That changes what they're comparing against.
Right. And the polls say the economy and cost of living are the top concern. But the campaign, and more importantly the coalition math, are still dominated by security, religion and state, and the referendum on Netanyahu. So there's a gap, and the gap is the story.
To understand where that gap came from, we have to go back. Way back. Because the center-left in Israel didn't just lose. It collapsed, and it collapsed from a position of total dominance.
Mapai was the dominant force from nineteen forty-eight. The Labor movement basically was the state for the first three decades. And then nineteen seventy-seven happens, and it loses power, and it never fully recovers.
Give me the numbers, because the numbers are brutal.
Labor won forty-seven seats in nineteen eighty-one. In March twenty twenty-one, it won seven.
Seven.
Seven. Out of a hundred and twenty.
That's not a decline, that's a disappearance with a receipt.
And the fragmentation that caused it isn't recent. It goes back to ideological splits in the fifties and sixties. Mapam's pro-Soviet orientation. The Lavon Affair. And then Ben-Gurion walks out in nineteen sixty-five and creates Rafi. Colin Shindler's argument is that that walkout opened the way for the right to attain power. The left did the splitting to itself.
That's the part people miss. The story is usually told as the right rising. But a lot of it is the left dividing, over and over, on principle, at exactly the moments it needed to hold together.
And each split had its own logic. The Lavon Affair alone is worth a whole episode. A security scandal in the mid-fifties that turned into a generational feud inside the labor movement. Ben-Gurion versus Sharett, then Ben-Gurion versus Eshkol. It wasn't a policy disagreement that festered. It was a personal war that institutionalized itself into factions.
So the left was already a coalition of rivals before it ever had a serious rival on the right.
Already a coalition of rivals. And that's the pattern that repeats. Every time the left faces an existential threat from outside, it's busy managing an existential threat from inside.
And then there's the demographic piece, which is harder to fix than the ideological one. Shmuel Rosner's argument is that the center-left's core, the secular, modern, Tel Aviv tribe, is about forty percent of the population. And his line is that it always plays with a bad hand.
Forty percent. So even a perfectly unified center-left is a minority bloc by construction.
By construction. And the collapse in the last decade was fast. In April twenty nineteen, Zionist parties that didn't self-identify as right won forty-nine seats. That's forty-one percent of the Knesset. By December twenty twenty, they were polling at twenty-six. A forty-seven percent drop in twenty months.
Twenty months. That's not a generation shifting, that's a couple of news cycles and a merger that didn't work.
And the response, eventually, was consolidation. In twenty twenty-four, Labor and Meretz merged into The Democrats under Yair Golan. First time the Zionist left has run under one banner.
Which is the logical move. But it's late, and it's small. The Democrats poll around ten or eleven seats now.
Right. So the consolidation happened, and it produced a party that's roughly the size of one of the factions that used to be part of a larger Labor bloc. That tells you how much ground was already gone.
Okay, so that's the history. Now explain the structure, because Daniel's point about plurality is the one I want to sit with. Why does Israel have thirteen parties in a hundred and twenty seats?
Closed-list proportional representation. One nationwide constituency, no districts. You vote for a party, not a person, and seats get allocated proportionally. The threshold is three point two five percent, which is about four seats.
So the whole country is one giant district.
One district, a hundred and twenty seats, and a low bar to get in. The outgoing Knesset had thirteen parties. Thirty-eight lists are contesting this one, and about twelve are expected to cross the threshold.
Thirty-eight lists. That's more parties than some countries have candidates.
And the threshold does two things at once. It pushes small parties to merge or get absorbed, because four seats is a real hurdle. But it's low enough that sectarian and niche parties survive. So you get both forces at once, consolidation at the top and fragmentation at the bottom. That's the plurality.
So the system doesn't produce a two-party dynamic and it doesn't produce pure chaos. It produces a permanent negotiation.
A permanent negotiation. Which is why nobody forms a government alone, and why every coalition is a collection of promises to very specific constituencies.
And that's the setup for the pragmatic-center thesis. Because if you're a party that wants to run on housing and groceries, you have to do it inside a system where the math rewards you for speaking to a narrow group instead.
So let's get to what's actually happening now, because the numbers here are the interesting part.
Start with what voters say.
The Israel Democracy Institute surveyed this in September. For Center voters, the economy and cost of living is the single most important voting factor at forty point five percent. Ahead of security, which is twenty-five.
So the center is telling pollsters, in the clearest possible terms, that it's an economic bloc now.
For the Left, it's different. Religion and state leads at thirty-nine percent, with the economy second at thirty-four. So even within the non-right camp, the center and the left have different priorities.
Which is its own fragmentation problem. The center wants groceries, the left wants religion and state, and they're supposed to be one bloc.
They're supposed to be one bloc, and they poll as two electorates. That's part of why the consolidation into The Democrats is harder than it looks. You can merge the party machinery. You can't merge the voters' priorities.
And the young?
This is the number I keep thinking about. Among Israelis eighteen to thirty-five, housing is the top issue for thirty-eight percent. More than double any other issue. And when asked to rate the state's performance on housing, they gave it two and a half out of ten.
Two and a half. That's not a bad grade, that's a failing grade with a note from the teacher.
And seventy-five percent said they'd consider voting for a party they'd never voted for before if it offered long-term solutions.
That last one is the whole thesis in a single number. Three-quarters of young voters are available. They're not locked in.
They're available. The question is whether anyone's actually asking for them.
And here's where it gets frustrating. The Times of Israel flagged this. Politicians are largely not campaigning on economic anxiety. The voters say housing, the campaigns say security and Bibi.
So you have a demand-side surge and a supply-side nothing.
Which brings us to the new parties. Because the pitch does exist, it's just not in its own vehicle.
And this is worth being precise about. There is no standalone cost-of-living party in Israel. No single-issue vehicle. The economic pitch is carried inside broad centrist parties.
Name them.
Yashar, Eisenkot's party, founded September twenty twenty-five. It's the largest opposition party, polling around twenty-two to twenty-five seats. Its platform includes a universal service law, a state commission of inquiry into October seventh as the first cabinet act, fifteen billion shekels over five years to rebuild the north, and conditions on core-curriculum funding.
Then Beyachad.
Bennett and Lapid merged in April twenty twenty-six. Polls around thirteen seats. It was at twenty-six when it formed, so it's lost half its support.
That's a merger that's gone backwards.
The Democrats, Golan, ten to eleven. Yisrael Beiteinu, Liberman, around nine.
So you've got four parties in the pragmatic-to-center space, and together they're substantial, but they're separate, and they're competing for overlapping voters.
Which is the fragmentation problem again, in a new costume. The center is doing what the left did. Splitting.
And here's the thing that makes it worse. Those four parties aren't just splitting the vote. They're splitting the message. Each one has to differentiate itself from the other three, so each one drifts toward its own niche. Yashar leans security-competence, Beyachad leans anti-Netanyahu, The Democrats lean social-democratic, Liberman leans secular-right. Four versions of the same pitch, each diluted.
Diluted and duplicated. And the voter who wants the economic message hears four different half-messages instead of one clear one. That's not a messaging failure. That's a structural one.
Okay. So here's the arithmetic question, and I think it's the one that decides whether Daniel's thesis holds. Can any of this actually form a government?
No. Not on the current numbers. Neither bloc reaches sixty-one without Arab parties.
And the opposition leaders won't rely on them.
Most of them won't. Eisenkot was explicit about this in his first in-depth English interview this week. His redline is that whoever doesn't accept Hamas is a terrorist organization won't be a partner in the next government. And he says he doesn't see an Arab party that accepts his principles. He's also ruled out a rotation government.
So the pragmatic frontrunner has redlines that may make his own pragmatism unworkable.
That's the paradox. He's the guy running on getting things done, and his coalition conditions may prevent him from getting anything done. It's the fragmentation he's promising to fix, operating on him.
And there's the disqualification fight on top of it.
On the twenty-fourth, the Central Election Committee disqualified the Joint List and Ra'am, and two candidates, Sami Abu Shehadeh and Ofer Cassif. But it allowed Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism–Zehut to run.
So Arab parties out, far-right parties in.
The Supreme Court is expected to overturn the party bans. The Joint List called it an attempt to steal the election and deny the voices of more than a million citizens. Mansour Abbas called it political, illegitimate and anti-democratic. Ben-Gvir, for his part, called the effort to disqualify his own party a political assassination.
Everyone's being assassinated. Nobody's being assassinated.
That's the register of Israeli coalition politics. It's maximal language deployed over procedural moves.
But the procedural move matters, because it's a live question about whether the election is seen as legitimate. And that's before we get to the polarization question Daniel raised.
And here I'd push back gently on the framing. The polarization-at-the-margins story is only partly true for Israel. Voters' stated priorities are actually centrist. Economy, housing. It's the campaign and the coalition math that are polarized, not the electorate.
So Israel is running against the global trend in one sense and with it in another.
In one sense, yes. The voters are more moderate than the discourse. But the structure, the threshold, the coalition math, the redlines, all of that pulls toward the extremes because that's where the leverage is. A small party with four seats can hold a government hostage. So the system rewards the margins even when the voters don't live there.
That's a cleaner version of the thesis than the one we started with. It's not that Israelis are polarized. It's that the system converts a moderate electorate into an extreme government.
That's the mechanism. And it's why the pragmatic center's rise is real but fragile. The demand is there. The vehicle is fragmented. And the arithmetic doesn't care how popular your platform is.
Let's talk about the first-time voters, because that's the wildcard.
Five hundred and fifty thousand of them. That's roughly ten to twelve Knesset seats.
Ten to twelve seats is the difference between a bloc and a majority.
It is. And these are voters who've never done this before, who rate the state two and a half out of ten on housing, and three-quarters of whom say they'd vote for someone new. If even a chunk of them turn out and vote on housing, that's the fulcrum Daniel's asking about.
But turnout is the whole game. And young voters who feel unrepresented are exactly the ones who stay home.
Which is the trap. The party that speaks to them has to exist, and be viable, and be seen as viable, before they'll show up. And viability in this system means coalition math, which means the thing they're voting for might not be able to govern anyway.
So the pragmatic center has to solve a problem it can't solve alone, using voters who won't show up until it's solved.
That's the bind. And there's one more piece. Sixty-two percent of Israelis say they're concerned about Israel's low international standing.
Which is interesting, because that's not a domestic economic issue, but it's also not a security issue in the traditional sense. It's a competence issue. It's about how the country is seen and whether it's being run well.
And Eisenkot's line on that is pointed. He said the fact that Netanyahu, quote, Captain America, is bringing Israel to the lowest point in relations with American society. That's a competence attack dressed as a security attack.
Which is exactly how you'd expect the pragmatic center to fight. You don't out-hawk the right. You argue that the current government is bad at the things the right claims to be good at.
That connects back to the housing numbers. The state scoring two and a half out of ten isn't an ideology problem. It's a delivery problem. And delivery is where the pragmatic pitch lives.
The thesis, steelmanned, is this. The center-left's historic weakness is structural and demographic. It can't fix that by being more left. But it might fix it by being less ideological and more competent, and by speaking to a young electorate that cares about rent.
The counterargument is Rosner's. Forty percent is forty percent. No amount of pragmatism changes the demographic ceiling.
Unless the pragmatism pulls voters from the right.
Which is the actual play. Yashar polling at twenty-two to twenty-five seats isn't winning the left's forty percent. It's winning people who voted for Likud and are tired of the chaos.
The fulcrum isn't the center-left becoming a majority. It's the center-left becoming a coalition partner that the right can't ignore.
That's a better way to put it. And it's why the redlines matter so much. If Eisenkot won't sit with Arab parties, and he won't sit with Netanyahu, then his path to power runs through a very narrow gate.
If he can't get through it, the pragmatism was a campaign, not a government.
Hilbert: "Pragmatic" is the wrong word for it.
How so?
Hilbert: I did polling for a centrist party, back when they still called it that. Weeks on the phone, night after night, same script, same questions. And the same answer kept coming back in different words. I don't care about the peace process, I care about my mortgage. Over and over.
What did the party do with that?
Hilbert: Nothing. We had the internal numbers. Same forty percent you're describing. Economy first, by a mile. And the campaign manager sat in a room with those numbers and said, you can't win on housing. You win on fear. So we ran on security. And we lost.
Did you tell him he was wrong?
Hilbert: I was a junior analyst. I was there to dial the phone and log the answer. I logged the answer. He read the log. He made the call.
The data was there and it was ignored.
Hilbert: The data was there. But here's the thing you're both missing. It wasn't just him. When those same people got into the booth, they didn't vote on the mortgage either. They told us housing. They voted on fear. Every time.
The polling was right and the voters were lying?
Hilbert: Not lying. Changing their minds in the room. You ask someone in their kitchen what matters, they tell you the truth. You put them in a booth with a ballot in front of them, and something older takes over. The campaign manager knew that. That's why he ignored the numbers. He wasn't wrong about people. He was wrong about the country, maybe. But not about people.
That's a uncomfortable point. It means the pragmatic center's rise could be a polling artifact.
Hilbert: It means the demand is real and the behavior is not. Those are two different things. I spent two years learning that on a telephone. I don't know what you do with it. I just know the forty percent is real and it doesn't show up on election day the way it does on the phone.
The party that campaigns on housing has to convince people to vote the way they talk.
Hilbert: Or it has to give them something to fear. That's what the man said, and he'd been doing it longer than I had. I didn't like him. He was right about the booth.
Can I push on that, Hilbert? Because "voters vote on fear" is a strong claim. Is that really what the data showed, or is that what the campaign manager believed?
Hilbert: Both. The data showed the stated priority was the economy. The behavior showed the vote went to security parties. Those two things sat in the same spreadsheet for months. You can interpret that as voters lying, or you can interpret it as voters having more than one priority and the security one being stickier. The campaign manager interpreted it the second way but acted on the first. That's politics.
The real lesson isn't "voters are irrational." It's "stated priority isn't the same as decision priority."
Hilbert: That's a fairer way to say it. The kitchen answer is real. The booth answer is also real. They're just answering different questions.
Okay. So if Hilbert's right, the gap between priorities and politics isn't just a messaging failure. It's a behavioral one. Voters say economy, vote security.
Which reframes the whole thesis. The pragmatic center's problem isn't that nobody's asking for it. It's that the ask doesn't survive contact with the ballot.
That's the most common wrong belief about this whole thing. People hear "voters care about the economy" and assume that means the economy decides elections. It doesn't. It means the economy is what voters say when you ask them. What decides elections is what they do when they're alone in the booth, and that's a different question entirely.
The fulcrum isn't the cost-of-living issue. It's whether anyone can make the cost-of-living issue feel urgent enough to beat the fear.
Which is a much harder problem than the polling suggests. The demand is there. The behavior is the bottleneck.
That's the thing to watch on the twenty-seventh of October. Not whether the parties talk about housing, but whether the voters who say housing actually vote that way. If they do, Daniel's thesis holds and the center becomes the fulcrum. If they don't, the forty percent was a number on a phone call, and the campaign manager from Hilbert's old firm was right all along.
Either way, the answer comes from the booth, not the poll. Which is the one place nobody gets to ask a follow-up question.
That's the episode. If you want to argue with us about it, or if you think Hilbert's campaign manager was right, the website is my weird prompts dot com. You can also email us at show at my weird prompts dot com.
Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop.
This has been My Weird Prompts.
We'll be back soon.
