Former prime minister Naftali Bennett formally registered a new political party on Tuesday – more than two years after he quietly stepped away from politics – signaling the first step in a bid months in the making to return to national politics.
The registration of this party – with the placeholder name “Bennett 2026” – also heralds the start of what is likely to be a significant change in the country’s political landscape before the next election, which must be held by October 2026.
Bennett’s will not be the only new party that will contest the election. Other figures, both well-known and less so, are sure to leap into the fray, believing that following the catastrophe of the October 7 massacre, the Israeli public wants to see new faces and hear fresh voices.
But Bennett’s registration of the new party makes him one of the first to take significant organizational steps in that direction.
This will be the fourth different party Bennett leads into an election, having led Jewish Home in 2013 and 2015, New Right in 2019, and Yamina in 2020 and 2021. Yamina has reportedly accrued some NIS 10 million in debts, but by forming a new party, these will not roll over onto Bennett.
Bennett's comeback
In a transparent attempt to keep Bennett from running, steps are under way in the Likud to pass legislation preventing someone from heading a new party if that person headed another party whose debts were not paid from a previous election.
With this move, Bennett is positioning himself as a national leader for the post-Netanyahu era. His decision to throw his hat into the ring shows how much the ground has shifted.
His previous foray into the premiership – leading an ideologically diverse and fragile coalition – collapsed within a year. He left politics in November 2022, bruised and largely unloved by both the Right, which felt betrayed by his willingness to team up with the Left and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am Party, and the Left, which never wholly trusted his ideological instincts.
Whether Bennett’s comeback becomes a serious factor in the next election or fades will depend on a complex interplay of timing, messaging, alliances, and the memory of his previous tenure. For instance, how much will his previous willingness to break a pledge and form a government with Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid – something that will undoubtedly be repeated continuously in the election campaign – come back to haunt him?
Presently, a theoretical party led by Bennett is doing very well in the polls, and were the election held now, it would win the most seats in the Knesset by a sizable margin.
In Friday’s weekly Maariv poll, a Bennett-led party would win 27 seats, two more than in the previous week’s survey and eight seats ahead of the Likud. According to this poll, Bennett could form a government without the Likud, Otzma Yehudit, the Religious Zionist Party, the haredi parties, and Ra’am. In that constellation, however, he would need to take in Yair Golan’s hard-left The Democrats Party.
These polling figures, however, should be viewed with caution, because historically, Bennett does significantly better in the polls than in actual balloting. In the last election he contested, in March 2021 – the election that ultimately led to him becoming prime minister – he won seven seats, although a Channel 12 poll just two weeks before the voting had him winning 13. That trend has been consistent throughout his political career.
Bennett’s move is not happening in a vacuum. Some 18 months after the October 7 massacre, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains politically resilient, with the passage of the budget last week giving his government breathing space and ensuring its survivability, even though he is increasingly embattled.
Netanyahu has been aided by the fact that neither National Unity chairman Benny Gantz nor Lapid have enthused the public or managed to convert widespread frustration with the situation into looking to them as viable alternatives. It is into this vacuum that Bennett now steps.
Bennett is gambling that the Israeli public, particularly on the moderate Right, is looking for a new option: someone with security credentials, managerial competence, and nationalist bona fides, but without the baggage of ideological extremism or personal scandal – a sort of “serious Right” figure, untainted by the dysfunction and ideological fervor of this government, at least when it comes to judicial reform.
Bennett is also gambling that the public, still reeling from the October 7 massacre, is open to political recalibration, just as it was open to a political realignment after the Yom Kippur War. Whether he can fill this space remains an open question, since he carries significant political baggage.
To many on the Right, he remains the man who stole the premiership from Netanyahu in 2022 by teaming up with Lapid and Abbas – even if the alternative then was yet another election. Many of his former backers, moreover, blame him for abandoning them by stepping away from politics so suddenly in 2022.
And yet, the passage of time – and intervening events – have a way of softening memories. To some, Bennett’s pragmatism may, after October 7, look less like betraying principles and more like the kind of compromises the country needs to move forward.
One advantage Bennett does have is that he can craft a message suited to the current moment: the desire of much of the public for national conciliation and unity, seriousness, and sobriety. His rhetoric during the war was less divisive than that of some in the government and the opposition. He emphasized responsibility, cohesion, solidarity, and security – words that will surely resonate in the next campaign.
But tone alone won’t win votes. Bennett will also need to detail a vision, something he so far has been hesitant to articulate. He has given no Israeli press interviews and has stayed mute on many of the day’s burning issues – obviously not wanting to distance potential voters.
Bennett will also need a slate of credible candidates on his party list and an answer to the question: Why him?And his answer will have to be very compelling. Yes, there is a hearty appetite in the country for new faces, but the question is whether that appetite also extends to returning ones. Also, having once tried Bennett and having found the result messy, will the public be willing to try again?
By registering his party on Tuesday, Bennett is betting that it will.
He is wagering that Israeli voters are ready to reconsider a figure who once divided the Right but now offers experience, pragmatism, and a break from toxic polarization. His success is far from guaranteed, and his road is strewn with bitter political enemies and disappointed former supporters.
But in a political landscape that appears especially volatile and unpredictable, Bennett seems to have calculated that there is space for a political figure who can speak to the Right without being extreme, to the Center without being soft, and to a country thrown from one crisis to the next with the promise of seriousness and stability.
