65 days until the elections: The first in-depth poll among Israeli Arabs that was published on Sunday evening in Makan 33 and Kan 11 News indicates that a new low is expected in the participation of Israeli Arabs in the elections. This could give Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc a majority of 61 seats required to form a government.
According to the poll, conducted by the StatNet Institute led by Yousef Makladeh, the voting rate in Arab society will be only 39% in the upcoming elections, the lowest ever figure of voting among Israel’s Arab citizens.
For comparison, the previous lowest turnout was in the last elections in 2021 and it was 44.6%. A year before that, the participation of the Arab citizens was actually at its peak - 64.8%. The Joint List won 15 seats in that election.
According to the Sunday’s poll, the Joint List with Balad wins five seats, one less than it currently has. Mansour Abbas' Ra’am Party wins 4 seats. Another interesting statistic is that the Likud wins a seat and half among the Arab voters.
In the event that Balad runs separately from the Joint List, the Arab parties collapse. The Joint List (which would only include Hadash and Ta’al) wins 4 seats, on the threshold of the electoral threshold, as does Ra'am, which also wins 4 seats. Balad does not pass the electoral threshold. In this scenario, the Arab parties with only eight seats, compared to the ten they have in the current Knesset.