Poll: Solid Majority Do Not Want New Elections

The majority of Israelis do not want new elections, a poll by i24 News and Yisrael Hayom shows. A full 62% of those who responded in a representative poll of all Israelis said they were in favor of actions that would cancel the upcoming September elections. Fifty percent said they were opposed to repeat elections, while 25% said they didn’t care one way or another.

Israeli media this week was dominated by supposed efforts by the Likud and other parties to cancel the September elections. Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein announced that he was working on that possibility, but the only way to achieve that, political experts said, was to institute a unity government between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party – a possibility rejected this week by both.

But according to the poll, 73% of Israelis are in favor of a unity government. According to analysts quoted by Yisrael Hayom, Israelis are suffering from “election ennui. It’s summer, and it’s hot outside. People are busy with end of school year parties, summer camps for their kids, summer vacation plans, and so on. The last thing they want to hear about in July and August is a deep-dive analysis of political or ideological concepts.”

The results of the poll do not bode well for any of the large parties, the analysts said, as many Israelis were likely not to even bother to vote, especially with polls showing that a redo of elections will do nearly nothing to establish political stability and push the country in one political direction or another, they said.