Netanyahu's reserved Likud slots stir unease as slates are filed

Update, 9 September, 01:08 Israel time

Attention on the closing hours of filing has shifted to the internal composition of Likud's slate. Ynet reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a group of reserved places on the party's list and then delivered a statement from Jerusalem, saying there remained a task to complete against the government in Iran and contrasting his own record with that of Gadi Eisenkot, whom he accused of having wanted to withdraw from Gaza. The reserved slots are places on a list that a party leader allocates directly rather than leaving to the primary results.

According to a further Ynet report, figures around Netanyahu had sought a higher profile addition to the slate, and names raised included Moshe Kahlon, Gilad Erdan, Gabi Ashkenazi, Ofer Winter and Chico Tamir, but the central candidates he wanted declined. Ynet reported that the names eventually presented caused unease among Likud members of Knesset, quoting the complaint that some of the reserved placements were unreasonable.

Ynet also profiled several of the new faces, among them Eli Goldschmidt, a former Labour member of Knesset who has previously criticised Netanyahu in personal terms, the broadcaster Yaakov Bardugo, and the lawyer David Peter.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Likud submitted its final candidate list with Netanyahu warning that the election would decide Israel's future.

The story as first reported

The window for submitting candidate lists to Israel's Central Elections Committee closed on Tuesday evening, ending the registration phase of the 2026 Knesset election campaign. The Israeli news site News.co.il and the political correspondent Amit Segal both reported that registration had finished, with Segal writing that the first part of the campaign was over and that from this point there were no longer scenarios, only the real thing.

Ynet reported that the second day of filing ran late into the evening, and that by the early evening hours Shas, the Sephardi haredi party, was the only one of the remaining parties to have submitted its candidate names that day. Representatives of Likud, the party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, arrived after 20:30, as did representatives of Blue and White, according to Ynet's live coverage of the closing hours. Ynet noted that the process formally ended at 22:00 but was expected to wrap up around midnight.

What the Central Elections Committee deadline actually does

Israel elects its parliament, the Knesset, by nationwide proportional representation. Voters do not choose an individual candidate; they choose a party list, and seats are allocated to parties in the order their candidates appear on that list. The submission deadline is therefore one of the hardest dates in an Israeli campaign: once lists are filed with the Central Elections Committee, the body that administers national elections and rules on candidate eligibility, the menu of parties and the internal ordering of each slate are essentially fixed. Mergers, splits and last minute deals between party leaders have to be completed before the clock runs out, which is why the final hours are covered closely by Israeli media.

The incoming parliament will be the 26th Knesset, as Ynet described in its running list of candidates. Each list can contain up to 120 names, matching the number of seats in the chamber, although only parties that clear the electoral threshold enter the Knesset at all. Parties that fall short win no representation, and the votes cast for them are effectively lost to their political bloc, which makes threshold arithmetic one of the central strategic questions of every Israeli campaign.

Blue and White running alone

The Jerusalem Post reported that parties were finalising their slates ahead of the deadline and that Blue and White, led by former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Benny Gantz, opted to run on its own despite polling. In the Jerusalem Post's account, the party is polling below the electoral threshold. Gantz, a former defence minister and member of the wartime government, has previously formed and dissolved electoral alliances between campaigns, and the choice of whether to merge with another party or run independently is the standard dilemma for lists hovering near the cut off point.

The candidates most voters will never hear of

Because lists can run to 120 names, the lower reaches of a slate are often filled with symbolic or honorary placements, and small parties with little chance of entering the Knesset still file full rosters. Ynet published a separate survey of the lesser known candidates on this year's ballot, including a self described socialist millionaire, a figure named Semyon Grafman, and the wife of Yigal Amir, the man convicted of assassinating prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. That report also noted that Segalovitch is the only Jewish candidate among the 73 candidates of Ra'am, the United Arab List, and that a newly formed haredi party placed women in its top group of names. Ynet's survey also pointed to poets and Olympic athletes buried deep in the lists, and to those given the honour of the final slot.

What the reports do not say

The material available does not give the election date itself, the number of lists submitted, or the level of the electoral threshold. It does not name the parties that merged or the deals that collapsed in the closing hours, nor does it give polling figures for Blue and White or any other list beyond the Jerusalem Post's statement that Gantz's party is below the threshold. The Ynet reports were published while filing was still under way and were marked as updating, so details described during the evening may have changed by the time the process ended. No source in this material reports objections filed to the Central Elections Committee against particular candidates or lists, a step that in Israel typically follows registration and is decided before ballots are printed.