The latest Knesset Channel election poll shows Likud trailing Labor by one seat. Naftali Bennett and his Bayit Yehudi party fails to climb back to 16 seats and the combined Arab bloc remains the third largest party along with others. The poll was released on Monday, 27 Shevat. The poll was conducted by Panels Politics involving 760 respondents during the “Ulpan Patuach” program with Orit Lavie at 14:00 on the Knesset Channel. The margin of error is +/- 3.6%.
Labor/The Movement: 24
Likud: 23
Yesh Atid: 12
Bayit Yehudi: 12
Arab Bloc: 12
Shas: 7
Yahadut Hatorah: 7
Kulanu: 7
Yisrael Beitenu: 6
Meretz: 6
Yachad: 4
Respondents added that the Likud campaign is more influential (52%) than the Labor/The Market campaign (15%) in the ongoing election campaign. One-third of the respondents did not have an opinion.
(YWN – Israel Desk, Jerusalem)
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3 Responses
Math is unchanged. Likud plus right-wing parties plus hareidim are a majority (requires hareidim to join, which requires ending conscription). Alternatively, Likud can join with leftwing parties to form a hareidi-free government. If that fails, Labor could form a government if it included support from Hareidim and Arabs – which would also require ending conscription.
The deciding factor is whether the secular politicians are more concerned with their secular agendas (for the Right, keeping the territories), or would they sacrifice all in order to conscript hareidim.
They already tried having a govt. without charedim last time… and it didn’t work out too well.
If the right wins that means we would probably have
Likud + Bayit Yehudi + Kulanu + Yisrael Beiteinu = 48 seats. Even if the polls are off a few seats maybe they can get into the 50s. This either forces them to sit with Yesh Atid again or bring in the frum parties and end conscription (or give them ALOT of money for yeshivos, etc.). If they chose the first option it is more or less the same story as last time which just led to early elections.
If the left wins then we would have
Labor + Yesh Atid + Meretz + Kulanu = 49. At this point they can either bring in the Arabs or the Frum paties (without Yachad) to get them over the top. It might be easier to bring in the Arabs since the frum parties would demand ending conscription which wouldn’t sit well with Yesh Atid and Meretz.
Labor cannot realistically form a coalition with the Arabs so a left wing coalition seems out of reach – unless Labor can form a coalition with both the charedim and all three centrist parties (Kulanu, Yisrael Beiteinu and Yesh Atid) which would make an unlikely and unstable coalition at best.
Likud might be able to form a coalition similar to the previous coalition (which would include BY and the three centrists parties) but only if a few more seats move that way. And we have ample evidence that such a coalition is likely to be unstable.
Likud can form a coalition with the charedim, BY and 2 of the 3 centrist parties (presumably, Kulanu and Yisrael Beiteinu) but if Yachad fails to pass the threshold the majority would be too small to be stable. And the tensions between the charedim and both BY and Yisrael Beiteinu might make for an unstable coalition.
Likud and Labor can easily form a large unity government coalition with either the centrist parties, the charedim (presumably sans Yachad) or some mixture of both. This is the only option that readily leads to a coalition large enough to be stable – but without some specific unifying goal such a coalition would likely be unstable as well.
Interesting times.