Poll: Likud at 29 Seats, Denying Right Majority in Next Knesset

Neither the Right nor the Left is currently in a position to form the next government, a Yisrael Hayom-i24NEWS poll finds.

According to the poll, which was carried out by the Maagar Mochot research institute, if elections were held today, the Likud would garner 29 Knesset seats. With 16 seats, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid would be the second largest party. Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope Party would receive just 13 seats, while Yamina would receive ten seats.

According to the poll, the first to be carried out since the parties submitted their slates to the Central Elections Committee, any movement in party alignment could tip the scales when it comes time to form a coalition. While Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc seemingly won’t manage to garner the 61 Knesset seats required to form a coalition, neither is any of his rivals. All this could fast track Israel’s path to a fifth round of elections.

The two parties predicted not to make it into the Knesset, based on this poll, are Yaron Zelekha’s New Economic Party and Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am, the latter of which recently split from the Joint Arab List. Both these parties have been bleeding support due to polls predicting they will fail to make it into the Knesset for quite some time.

United Torah Judaism and Shas are expected to garner seven and nine Knesset seats, respectively. The Joint List is predicted to receive ten seats. Yisrael Beytenu is set to receive six Knesset seats.

In total, the right-wing bloc, including Yamina, is expected to garner 60 seats. That’s just shy of an outright coalition, but it doesn’t put the right-wing parties in the opposition either; what it does do is sentence them to political limbo.

The poll was carried out among 505 respondents, comprising a representative sample of Israelis 18 and over, and has a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.