There is a voter I keep meeting. He did his army service, or his son did, or both. He votes Right and always has. He believes Torah and the rifle belong together, the way the hesder yeshivot (programs that braid Talmud study with combat service) have insisted for two generations. And he has no party that he feels represents his values and ideals.
He will not vote Likud because the party he trusted spent this Knesset shielding haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft evasion to keep its coalition alive. He will not vote for Bezalel Smotrich, who built his career on the national-religious service ethos and then let his party advance a Torah-study Basic Law that dresses up the same exemption. And he will not follow Naftali Bennett into Beyachad (“Together”), because Bennett owns the draft issue but sold it in a package with Yair Lapid, and that price is too high.
Too Right for the opposition, too betrayed for the coalition, too principled for the far Right. Call him the “homeless Right.” The data says there are at least six seats for him, and that he, not the slogans, decides the next election.
The numbers are not soft. A Channel 12 poll this spring found that 42% of Likud’s 2022 voters are no longer firmly committed to the party, and only 58% say they will definitely vote for it again. The instinct is to assume that they drift rightward, toward Smotrich or Itamar Ben-Gvir. They do not. Just 4% say they would move further Right. The exit is real, and it does not lead where the coalition assumes.
The one conviction the political market refuses to sell
What unites these voters is one conviction the political market refuses to sell them. Roughly 60% of Israelis, veterans and first-time voters alike, say it will not back a party that preserves the current haredi exemption. For the national-religious voter, this is not policy. It is a body count. His community served, and it buried its sons at a rate the yeshiva world did not. He has run out of patience, and no party on offer matches his conviction with its conduct.
This is why he is decisive, and the math is brutally simple. The blocs have been frozen for months, the coalition stuck at around 50 seats and the Zionist opposition at around 60, neither side touching the 61 it needs. In a parliament that locked, the homeless seats are the only liquid votes left. They determine whether the right reassembles a majority or whether the deadlock hardens into another round of paralysis.
The leverage does not end on election night. The new right-wing efforts now circling these voters share one feature: a refusal to commit in advance to either camp. A party of six that pre-commits to no one is, in a 50-against-60 Knesset, the kingmaker. That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is the most concrete form of decisive there is.
So where is the party? This is the part the polls cannot show you. The demand is settled. The supply is a swarm. There are individuals and groups weighing a run, some with their names already in the papers, many more moving quietly, and a sizable share of them waiting to see what becomes of Netanyahu and his party before they move. The homeless Right is not waiting for a platform. It is waiting for a founder, and the founders are waiting on each other and on the prime minister. Demand certain, supply contingent.
Vacuums under this much pressure do not stay empty
That is the honest catch, and it belongs in this analysis rather than out of it. A bloc can be decisive in potential and inert in practice. These voters have told every pollster what they believe, and then parked their support, for now, with the very parties that betrayed their beliefs. Conviction has outrun behavior. The home has not been built.
But vacuums under this much pressure do not stay empty. The first credible entrant who is genuinely of the Right, clean of the extremists, free of Lapid, and willing to make haredi enlistment the whole campaign rather than a talking point, likely clears the field. Which is precisely why no one wants to move first and get it wrong.
The coalition is betting these voters come home out of habit and fear. The opposition is betting they can be rented through Beyachad. Both bets misread the man I keep meeting. He is not undecided. He is unrepresented. The seat that learns the difference will govern.