Hunch. Haaretz's poll tracker on 18 October put the opposition alliance one seat ahead of Netanyahu's camp, 52 to 51.
The first-task market resolves on the statement of the president of Israel: YES if the first task to form a government after the vote goes to Benjamin Netanyahu by the end of 10 November 2026, NO if it goes to someone else. If no one has been given the task by then the market is VOID, and Al Jazeera and BBC are the backup.
We looked for cases where a sitting Israeli prime minister led his party into a Knesset election since 2003, when Israel stopped choosing its prime minister in a separate vote. We found nine such elections. The three votes of 2019 and 2020 were one long crisis with no new government in between, so they count as one. Each time we asked if the prime minister was still in office 58 days after the vote.