Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Getty)
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc has erased a sizable polling deficit against the opposition, while his Likud party has nearly caught the Yashar party of former military chief Gadi Eisenkot ahead of next month’s election.
A Channel 13 poll released Wednesday showed Netanyahu-aligned parties and the opposition bloc tied at 53 seats each in the 120-seat Knesset, a shift from the network’s survey just a week earlier, which gave the opposition a 57-48 advantage. The two mainly Arab parties would hold the remaining 14 seats.
Neither bloc would reach the 61 seats needed to form a majority government.
Netanyahu’s Likud also made significant gains against Yashar, which has emerged as the leading opposition party ahead of the Oct. 27 election. Yashar was projected to win 22 seats, down from 24 a week earlier, while Likud climbed from 19 to 21.
The narrowing gap came as two more slates on the right cleared the electoral threshold in the new survey.
People of Israel, headed by retired Brig. Gen. Ofer Winter, was projected to win four seats. A newly announced joint slate of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism and former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut was projected to take six seats.
Netanyahu has been pushing smaller parties on the right to consolidate ahead of the Sept. 8 deadline for candidate lists, warning that votes cast for parties that fail to clear Israel’s 3.25% electoral threshold would effectively be lost. The parties announced their joint slate Tuesday.
Other parties in Netanyahu’s bloc were projected to win eight seats for United Torah Judaism, seven for Shas and seven for National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power.
On the opposition side, the joint B’Yachad slate headed by former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and opposition leader Yair Lapid was projected to win 12 seats, followed by Yair Golan’s Democrats with 11 and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu with eight.
Eisenkot nevertheless retained a sizable advantage over Netanyahu when respondents were asked whom they preferred as prime minister. Eisenkot led 47%-37%, according to Channel 13.
The mainly Arab Joint List was projected to win nine seats, while Ra’am would receive five.
The Channel 13 survey questioned 940 respondents and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.
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