Netanya Votes for a Successor to Its Mayor of 27 Years

The director general of Israel's Ministry of the Interior, Israel Ozana, visited the control centre of the ministry's Election Administration, according to a short ministry notice issued while voting was under way in the special election for mayor of Netanya. The notice added that information about the election and the location of polling stations could be found on the ministry's local elections portal.

That was the whole of it. Although the item was circulated as a mid-morning update on the Netanya vote, it contained no turnout percentage, no figures for ballots cast and no comparison with previous elections in the city.

Why Netanya was voting at all

Netanya is a coastal city of about 218,000 eligible voters roughly 30 kilometres north of Tel Aviv. It went to the polls on 20 January 2026 in a special election after the death of Miriam Feirberg-Ikar, who had been its mayor since 1998 and who died in November 2025 following a long illness, The Times of Israel reported. Ynetnews reported that four candidates were on the ballot and that polling stations stayed open until 10pm.

What the Interior Ministry does on polling day

Israel's local elections are run through the Interior Ministry rather than the Central Elections Committee that handles Knesset votes. The ministry sets the size of local councils in line with population and the law, and administers the machinery of polling day, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. The same explainer sets out the threshold that decides a mayoral race: a candidate needs at least 40 per cent of valid votes to win outright, and if nobody clears that bar the top two go to a run-off two weeks later.

Turnout therefore matters twice over in an Israeli mayoral election: once for who wins, and once for whether a second round is needed at all. Election-day control rooms exist in part to track it, station by station, as the day goes on.

The same explainer notes that for scheduled nationwide local elections polling day is an official day off work, a status restored for the 2018 round after two decades in which it did not apply. The Netanya vote was a one-city special election, and the Interior Ministry said in a separate notice that morning that the day was not a holiday there.

How the vote ended

The result, reported after polls closed, was decisive enough to settle the contest in one round. The Likud candidate Avi Slama, a 43-year-old economist who had sat on the city council since 2018, took 68 per cent of the vote against 27.49 per cent for the acting mayor, Tali Mulner, according to The Times of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had backed Slama and visited the city on polling day.

What the notice did not say

The ministry did not publish a turnout figure with the update, despite the framing of the item, and did not say what Ozana was told or saw at the control centre. It gave no indication of whether any irregularities had been reported, and named none of the candidates.