The union that shakes the Right: how Bezalel Smotrich can reach 10 mandates | Exclusive to Maariv
The Religious Zionism party is moving on the thin line between political survival and failure, and Zehut is betting on self-confidence that history does not necessarily support. Together, however, the two could become a real electoral force.
A poll conducted by the Maagar Mohot institute led by Prof. Yitzhak Katz and obtained by Maariv presents a surprising scenario: a technical union between Religious Zionism led by Bezalel Smotrich and the Zehut party of Moshe Feiglin could grant the joint list about 10 mandates — a significant electoral force that each of the parties separately struggles to achieve.
Smotrich's party is known for struggling in polls time and again against the electoral threshold. Even in polls where it does pass, it is usually a tight result of only four to five mandates — a number that leaves the party fragile, dependent on every small fluctuation in the polls, and exposed to a scenario where the party could simply be erased from the political map.
This is exactly where a union with Zehut could provide an answer. According to the poll data, when respondents are asked how they would vote in a scenario of a union between Religious Zionism and Zehut under a "technical block," the joint list jumps to 10 mandates — a significant increase relative to the independent strength of Religious Zionism, and certainly relative to the uncertain chances of Zehut alone.
Such a scenario puts the coalition, according to the latest Maariv poll, at 55 mandates. Assuming we see more small parties uniting, such as Blue and White, Ofer Winter, and the party of Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein, it is possible that all the connections will give the coalition 61 votes and the possibility to form the next government.
Zehut has approached Religious Zionism several times to examine a union, but at the moment they have not been met with open arms.
However, within Zehut there is an atmosphere of self-confidence: they are convinced that the party will pass the electoral threshold even independently, without any union. The problem is that this confidence does not align with the polls showing that the party struggles to cross the required threshold.
This is also not the first time that figures in Zehut have expressed similar confidence. In the past, it has happened that the party entered elections with the belief that it would pass the electoral threshold, and in practice remained below it — while burning votes that could have gone to other right-wing parties and contributed to the size of the entire block.
According to the poll, the main support bases for the Zehut party come from voters of other right-wing parties: 13% of Otzma Yehudit voters led by Itamar Ben Gvir, 3% of Yashar! voters led by Gadi Eizenkot, and 2% of Likud voters led by Benjamin Netanyahu. These data reinforce the picture that Zehut feeds mainly on votes that already belong to the right-wing camp — so that every vote it fails to convert into a mandate could simply disappear from the entire block.
The poll data paint a clear picture: alone, Religious Zionism moves on the thin line between political survival and failure, and Zehut bets on self-confidence that history does not necessarily support. Together, however, the two could become a real electoral force — and save the right-wing block from a scenario where entire votes go to waste due to unnecessary dispersion.
The poll was conducted by the Maagar Mohot institute, between July 23-27, 2026, among a sample of 501 respondents from the adult population in Israel (ages 18+), with a sampling error of 4.4% at a 95% confidence level.
