Israel Legislative election 2021 (Knesset) — Results

The snapshot

The election of 23 March 2021 — Israel's fourth in under two years — finally ended the deadlock, though not in the way the numbers first suggested. Likud remained comfortably the largest party with 30 seats on 24.19%, double the 17 seats of Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid. But Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc stalled at 52 seats, and in June 2021 an ideologically unprecedented eight-party "change government" — from the nationalist right to the Islamist Ra'am — was sworn in under Naftali Bennett, ending Netanyahu's twelve consecutive years in power.

A fractured field

The campaign, fought in the shadow of Netanyahu's corruption trial and Israel's world-leading vaccination drive, splintered both camps. On the right, Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope (6 seats) broke from Likud vowing never to serve under Netanyahu, while Bennett's Yamina (7) kept its options open. Netanyahu engineered a merger that brought the far-right Religious Zionist Party of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir into the Knesset with 6 seats. The Joint List split: Mansour Abbas's Ra'am ran alone on a pragmatic platform of budgets over ideology, and its 4 seats — the first time an Arab party's votes were courted by both blocs — proved decisive. Blue and White fell to 8, Labor recovered to 7, Shas and UTJ held 9 and 7, Yisrael Beiteinu 7, Meretz 6. Turnout, at 67.44%, was the lowest of the four-election cycle.

The change coalition

Netanyahu received the first mandate and failed. Lapid then stitched together Yesh Atid, Blue and White, Labor, Meretz, Yisrael Beiteinu, New Hope, Yamina and — historically — Ra'am, the first Arab party ever to join an Israeli governing coalition. Under a rotation deal, Bennett, whose party held just 7 seats, became prime minister first, with Lapid as foreign minister and alternate. The government was confirmed on 13 June 2021 by a 60–59 vote, the narrowest possible margin.

Why it mattered

The 2021 election proved a majority could be built on a single point of agreement — replacing Netanyahu — and normalised Arab participation in Israeli coalition politics. It also planted the seeds of the next collapse: a one-seat majority spanning eight parties from Meretz to Yamina could not survive contested legislation, and defections brought it down within a year, sending Israel to a fifth election in November 2022.

About the figures

All 120 seats are distributed by nationwide proportional representation (3.25% threshold, Bader–Ofer allocation); Israel has no electoral districts to map. Vote shares are Central Elections Committee certified results to two decimal places.

Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.