Israeli President Isaac Herzog says he will name a candidate to form the country’s next government on Sunday, after a majority of lawmakers backed opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Herzog made the announcement on Thursday at the close of marathon consultations with the parties elected to the 120-seat Knesset. Some 67 lawmakers endorsed Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff, while 46 backed Netanyahu.

Despite the margin, Herzog declined to name his choice immediately. In televised remarks he said that although the “results of the consultations may appear clear”, there were “mutual vetoes between the blocs and within the blocs themselves” that made it difficult to judge who had the best chance of assembling a coalition. He said he would hold personal talks with several party leaders over the Israeli weekend, which runs Friday to Saturday, before deciding.

The 27 October election left neither man with a clear path to a majority. Netanyahu’s Likud won 27 seats, more than any other single party, but his wider religious-nationalist coalition took only 53 in total. Eisenkot’s alliance of four Jewish-led parties, spanning the centre-left to the right, won 48. Parties representing Israel’s Palestinian minority won an unprecedented 19 seats.

Eisenkot, like Netanyahu, has ruled out forming a government with the Arab-led parties, yet both recommended him regardless, delivering his majority. “We want to do things that we did not do in the past in order to remove this criminal government,” Ahmad Tibi, a senior member of the Joint List, told the Associated Press.

Eisenkot’s party, Yashar, said his 67 recommendations were the most any candidate had received since 2015 and urged Herzog to grant the mandate quickly so a national emergency government could be formed.

Netanyahu suffered a further setback on Thursday when United Torah Judaism, one of two main ultra-Orthodox parties and a longtime ally, declined to recommend any candidate, breaking with him over his coalition’s failure to pass legislation exempting ultra-Orthodox men from military service.

Whoever receives the mandate will have 28 days to form a government, with a possible 14-day extension.