On a small dusty section of the strip in the middle of Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard last week a dozen tents were set. Attached to most were handwritten signs decrying Israel’s cost of living and other social issues.

Tiny in comparison to the social protest camp that occupied this same spot four years ago – when half a million Israelis joined demonstrations against the country’s high prices and social inequalities – on Wednesday lunchtime there were just five people in the camp. A few passersby, some in fancy dress ahead of Purim holiday, stopped to the read the signs: a man wearing a jaunty green Robin Hood cap with a red feather; some men in judo outfits. At one point a male voice shouts at the protesters: “Get a job!”

If there is a paradox about the small scale of the protest, it is to be found in the fact that the complaints the campers represent are the biggest issues concerning voters in elections that take place on 17 March, with 56% of Israelis telling the Knesset Channel that they will vote on socioeconomic issues.

By comparison, the threat of a nuclear Iran, the issue embraced by rightwing prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in his campaign for re-election almost to the exclusion of all others, has been much further down the list. The reality is that an overwhelming media focus on the figure of Netanyahu and Iran has created the impression of a peculiarly dissonant campaign where the concerns of ordinary Israelis have been sharply at odds with the political narrative imposed from above. It has been a campaign, by and large, where it has often seemed that the figure of Netanyahu – and the question of whether he should continue in office – has sucked the air out of the debate.

On Wednesday those sitting in the camp told stories familiar to most Israelis: of the struggle to find and pay for accommodation; the impossibility of buying somewhere to live; and of holding down several jobs at once to pay for necessities. Tal Jacob and Ronen Ratner arrived when the camp was set up last Sunday. Wearing an Adidas sports cap, Ratner says he has two jobs. On the minimum wage, he says: “An hour’s work is enough to buy a plate of falafel. The basic problem is the cost of living. It is very expensive to live here.” Hillel Konigsberg arrives with a bandaged wrist wearing a black T-shirt with yellow Hebrew lettering reading: “The people demand social justice.”

A driver, who grew up on the Bogside in Londonderry to mixed Catholic and Jewish parents before moving as a young man to Israel, he injured his arm two and a half months ago. Unable to work, he has struggled to make ends meet and feed his wife and baby, who have also spent time at the camp. “We are all facing the same problems,” he says, disclosing he has begged for food on Facebook.

Government statistics released last week underline the scale of the problem, and not just for Israel’s poorest, but for its battered middle class too. According to the central bureau of statistics, 41% of Israelis are in a constant state of overdraft with more than a third owing at least 10,000 shekels (£1,650), and most blaming the high cost of living.

As a hard-hitting report by the state comptroller revealed last month, house prices have rocketed in the last six years by almost 55% and rents in the same period rose 30% even as wages have remained largely stagnant. Dahlia Scheindlin, an independent pollster and political consultant who has worked in the past with the Labour party, headed by the main opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog, says there is “no question” that social issues are at the forefront of Israelis’ concerns across the political spectrum. And in theory at least, the importance of social and economic issues should benefit the Zionist Union – the party jointly led by Herzog and former justice minister and chief negotiator with the Palestinians Tzipi Livni, who have been marginally leading Netanyahu’s Likud in most recent polls.

A survey released on Friday, asking the voting intentions of Israel’s poorest voters, suggests Herzog’s party leads far more convincingly among the lowest economic sector. The same issues have also bolstered support for two smaller right-leaning centrist parties – Yesh Atid, led by former finance minister Yair Lapid, who was catapulted on to the political stage after the 2011 protests,– and the new Kulanu party led by former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, who some believe could be the king maker in negotiations to form a coalition after the elections.

The issue of social justice has also propelled former leaders of the social protests – including Stav Shaffir, now Israel’s youngest MP — to high spots on the Zionist Union’s list, suggesting its continuing potency, even if it can no longer draw half a million on to Rothschild. “In all polling that has been done, the cost of living and housing issues are number one, usually by a double-digit gap,” says Scheindlin. “That is pretty big, although you have to remember that in Israeli politics, people’s electoral choice is influenced by more than just their first policy priority.”

Explaining why people have not come back to the streets as they did four years ago, she says that the phenomenon of the 2011 social protests bucked a trend at a time when participation in all kind of demonstrations in Israel was declining, benefiting perhaps from the fact that they took place during the summer when people could join in. “In the elections that followed there was a choice – did people go for change or Netanyahu? They went for Netanyahu and hoped to bring change by electing newer parties under Netanyahu promising social change. The system bent – it didn’t break.”

Netanyahu’s response has been either to attempt to avoid the issue or distract from it. Following the report on high housing costs, he was widely lambasted for responding on Twitter with remarks about Iran. “When we talk about housing prices, about the cost of living, I do not for a second forget about life itself. The biggest threat to our life at the moment is a nuclear-armed Iran.”

On Friday too, in another widely criticised misstep, an internet video advert put up by Likud lumped together disgruntled port workers along with Hamas as “victims” of Likud’s policies, leading to the video being quickly pulled.

And whoever wins on 17 March will find untangling Israel’s woes complex. The feted “startup nation” is burdened with defence costs as a proportion of GDP far higher than many of its competitors, while it has subsidised the development of settlements in occupied Palestinian territories at the cost of spending inside Israel.

Interest groups, from the settlement movement to the ultra-orthodox on the issue of state subsidies and education, have carved out deeply held and self-interested positions that any coalition must negotiate. Although Netanyahu will be boosted by figures released on Friday by the OECD, showing Israel’s staggeringly high food prices in recent years have for the first time begun to drop by an annual 4.1% in the last year, some feel it may be too little and too late.

Manuel Trajtenberg is the economist who chaired the committee to look into the country’s socioeconomic problems after the 2011 protests – first triggered by outrage over the high cost of cottage cheese. These days he is Herzog and Livni’s pick to solve the economic problems. He believes that the electorate’s priorities are changing. “In these elections the socioeconomic issues are really important, contrary to the past where issues relating to conflict were prominent. What we saw in the mass protests in summer 2011 was that there is complete mismatch in Israel between macro-economic issues and micro-economic ones, especially around welfare.

“In the first respect people have been doing very well and the signs are positive on all sorts of issues from employment to the balance of payments. But at the same time there has been this explosion of public discontent with people demanding social justice. And not just marginalised people, the usual suspects. We are talking about the mainstreams of society.

“Netanyahu has focused on the macro side and lost sight of whether it helps the wellbeing of people. But the concept of trickledown is not working and inequality has been increasing because the cost of living, including housing prices, have skyrocketed in the last six years in real terms.” Trajtenberg, like others, blames in part the increasing dysfunction in the coalition cabinet system that, under Netanyahu, has seen key ministerial positions subcontracted to being run along the basis of party interest, lacking a joined-up strategy.

Back on Rothschild Boulevard, the small cluster of protest campers are dubious, not least Konigsberg. “The situation got worse, not better after 2011. We embraced the politicians who came to support us. We were stupid,” he says bitterly. Whoever is elected he does not hold out much hope. “I blame them all,” he says.