With less than a month to go before the election, the political map is static, the weekend polls show. The average of polls published by Walla!, Maariv, and Israel Today-i24 News is almost identical to the average of the last few weeks' surveys, and a unity government still seems to be the only possible solution, subject to the well-known limitations. Otherwise, the political deadlock will remain, and Israel could even face a fourth election. Blue & White still holds a slight lead over the Likud, the Joint Arab List still has thirteen projected Knesset seats, and the rest of the parties receive an average of eight seats each.
At this point, it seems that no matter what kind of drama presents itself - rocket fire in the south, shootings in the territories, car-ramming terrorist attacks, ex-parte peace plans, and the return of a "captive" and a diplomatic visits to Sudan - it makes no difference whatsoever to the predicted election result. The politicians too know that the Israeli public is fed up with campaigns, and they are hardly conducting any. In any case, the feeling is that what was is what will be.
It remains only to wait for the last two weeks to see whether the big guns will be pulled out, and the major parties will try to suck votes from the smaller ones, or whether the apathy will continue, and if it does, what that will do to the voter turnout.
An average of five recently published surveys gives the following numbers of projected Knesset seats for each party (because of the averaging process, the total may not equal 120, the actual number of seats in the Knesset):
Blue & White 35
Likud 33
Joint Arab List 13
Avoda-Gesher-Meretz 8
Yisrael Beitenu 8
Shas 8
Yamina 8
United Torah Judaism 8
Otzma Yehudit 0
The average is based on the following polls:
Yisrael Hayom-i24, February 7
Maariv, February 7
Walla!, February 6
103FM, January 31
Maariv, January 31
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on February 9, 2020
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2020