City Hall

Who currently governs the city, and what they have done with it.

Scaffold

This page holds the council arithmetic derived from the 2024 result and the research plan for the rest. The coalition composition, the portfolio allocation and the administration’s record are not yet researched and are tracked in open tasks. Nothing on this page beyond the seat counts should be treated as established.

The council as elected, February 2024

31 seats; 16 for a majority.

Bloc	Lists	Seats
Haredi	Degel HaTorah (6), Shas (6), Agudat Yisrael (3), Bnei Torah (1)	16
Religious-Zionist / right	United (2), Religious Zionist Party (2), Likud (1), Noam (1)	6
Mayor’s list	Our Jerusalem	2
Opposition / secular-pluralist	Jerusalem Union (4), Hitorerut (3)	7

Two features of this arithmetic drive everything downstream:

• The Haredi lists hold a bare majority on their own — 16 of 31. Any proposal that needs a council vote needs either their support or a coalition assembled around them, and there is no majority that excludes them.
• The mayor holds two seats. Moshe Lion won the mayoralty with 81% of the vote and commands 2/31 of the chamber. Mayoral authority here is coalition authority, and a platform that assumes a directly elected mayor can simply direct the city has misread the office.

This is why stage 4 of the pipeline includes an explicit council-arithmetic check, and why a proposal’s class under the powers doctrine is necessary but not sufficient: a class-A power still needs the votes.

What needs researching

The research plan for this section, in priority order:

1. The coalition as actually constituted — which lists signed, on what terms, and whether the coalition agreements are published. Coalition agreements are where a commitment gets traded away, and they are the highest-value document in this whole section.
2. Portfolio allocation — deputy mayors, committee chairs, and in particular who chairs finance and the local planning and building committee. Committee chairs decide what reaches the chamber.
3. Any changes since February 2024 — resignations, splits, coalition departures, by-election or replacement councillors. Two and a half years is long enough for the 2024 table to be wrong.
4. The administration’s record — the budget as approved each year and as executed, the municipal auditor’s reports, State Comptroller findings on the municipality, and the multi-year plans published and their delivery rate.
5. Faction profiles — one per list, covering its base, its published positions, and the motions its members have actually moved. These feed the comparison matrices.

Every item here is a research task under the same evidence rules as the policy work: Hebrew primary sources, protocols over press reports, and a date on every claim.

Sources

• Seat allocation derived from the 2024 result; see that page for its source caveat.