With less than two months before Israel’s 25th Knesset election, Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party is gaining on Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, a new poll shows.
If new elections were held today, according to a new poll conducted by Panels Politics and published Friday Ma’ariv, the Likud would remain the largest faction in the Knesset with 31 seats, an increase of one seat compared to the 30 the party won last year, but a decline from the 32 seats the party received in the previous Panels Politics poll released on August 29th.
Yesh Atid, by contrast, rose one seat to 24 mandates, according to the new poll.
Broken down by bloc, the Likud and its allies on the Right are projected to win a total of 58 seats, down from 59 seats in Monday’s poll, while the center-left – Arab bloc rose from 56 seats to 57, with five seats going to the pro-coalition right-of-center Yisrael Beytenu party.
The National Unity list – a joint ticket of Blue and White with the New Hope faction – received 13 seats in the poll, as did the alliance of the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit faction.
Among the haredi factions, Shas held steady at eight seats while United Torah Judaism slipped from seven seats in the prior poll to six.
On the Left, both Labor and Meretz received five seats.
The Joint Arab List is projected to win six seats, compared to four for the United Arab List (Ra’am).
Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked’s Zionist Spirit party failed to cross the electoral threshold, receiving just 1.9%.
The poll found that if the two haredi factions which form the United Torah Judaism list – the Hasidic Agudath Yisrael party and the non-Hasidic Degel HaTorah – ran independently, Agudath Yisrael would fall below the 3.25% electoral threshold with just 2.5%, while Degel would receive five seats.
