New Poll Shows Likud Falling Behind Eisenkot’s Party for the First Time

by | Jul 10, 2026 | News

For the first time since the two began polling neck and neck, a new survey shows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud slipping below Yashar, the party led by former IDF chief of staff and war cabinet member Gadi Eisenkot.

The result follows weeks in which the two parties had been effectively tied, and it lands at a pivotal moment. The Knesset is expected to dissolve within days, with national elections anticipated for late October. That vote will be the first since the October 7, 2023 attack and the wars that followed in Gaza, Lebanon, and against Iran.

Eisenkot has built his political identity around military credibility and criticism of the government’s handling of the war and its aftermath. He served in the emergency war cabinet before resigning, and has been among the most prominent voices demanding accountability for the failures of October 7. In recent days he has sharply attacked Justice Minister Yariv Levin over the confrontation with the High Court, calling the government’s conduct a threat to Israeli democracy on the eve of consequential elections.

Netanyahu, who has led Israel for most of the past seventeen years, remains a formidable campaigner with a devoted base and a record of defying unfavorable polling. His allies note that surveys taken months before an election frequently fail to predict outcomes, and that Israeli campaigns often reshape the field in their final weeks. Coalition arithmetic, rather than any single party’s raw total, typically determines who forms a government.

Still, the symbolism carries weight. Likud has anchored Israeli politics for decades, and polls showing it trailing any rival tend to reverberate through coalition negotiations, party primaries, and the calculations of smaller factions deciding where to align.

The campaign ahead will unfold amid unresolved questions: the fate of an inquiry into October 7, the drafting of ultra-Orthodox men, a defense budget expanding by hundreds of billions of shekels, and a constitutional standoff between the government and the courts.

Israeli voters have shown before that they are difficult to predict. What this poll signals is that the race is genuinely open, and that the coming months will be contested on every front.

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