Naftali Bennett's Yamina party has for the first time overtaken Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope, in a poll published by FM103 radio this morning. This poll projects twelve Knesset seats for Yamina in the March 23 election, versus eleven for New Hope. Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beitenu also strengthens in this poll, to eight projected seats, and after a Ma'ariv poll that gave the party nine seats, it has climbed to eight in the five-poll running average as well.
Likud remains the party with the most projected seats, unmoved on 28, while Yesh Atid, led by Yair Lapid, has succeeded in consolidating recent gains, and is projected to win twenty seats. The poll shows the Joint Arab List on eight seats - its worst showing yet, in a poll in which Ra'am, which broke away from the list, fails to cross the minimum vote threshold for winning any Knesset representation. Shas is also on eight seats, United Torah Judaism weakens slightly to six, and Labor is also on six seats.
Benny Gantz's Blue & White party is stable on five seats, followed by the Religious Zionist party with four seats.
Two weeks remain until the election, and the chances of any of the parties dropping out beforehand are growing smaller. The lack of movement in the distribution of votes indicates that another round, the fifth in two years, is not unthinkable, but on the other hand supporters of various parties have been saying that they have lied to pollsters in an organized way in order to distort the picture and cause votes to be wasted on rival parties that appear to be above the minimum vote threshold, encouraging voters to stick with them, but in reality are probably below it.
This kind of thing presumably happened in previous election campaigns as well, but the question is how extensive the phenomenon is this time round. If it really is widespread and is leading to the result that the impostors seek, it could be that by the next election we will no longer be able to use opinion polls in the way we have been accustomed to doing.
The average results of the five most recent polls are as follows:
Likud - 28 Knesset seats
Yesh Atid - 19
New Hope - 12
Yamina - 11
Joint Arab List - 9
Shas - 8
Yisrael Beitenu - 8
United Torah Judaism - 7
Labor - 6
Blue & White - 5
Religious Zionist - 4
Ra'am - 2
Meretz - 2
The figures for Ra'am and Meretz are numerical only and would not translate into any Knesset representation, as the minimum number of seats for any party is four (3.5% of the total number of votes cast). Because of the averaging process, the total number of seats is not 120, the actual number of seats in the Knesset.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on March 9, 2021
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