Israel election poll: no clear winner

The Channel 12 news survey said Likud would pick up 30 seats if the March 23 elections were held today, two more than the party received in the network’s poll last week. Likud has 36 seats in the outgoing Knesset. Opposition Leader Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party had 18 seats in the poll, down one from last week.

Likud’s gain appeared to come at the expense of the rival right-wing Yamina and New Hope parties, each of which received 10 seats in the poll. The parties got 13 and 11 seats respectively in the previous survey.

The Joint List, an alliance of three majority-Arab factions, got eight seats in the survey, as did the Shas party. Fellow Charedi party United Torah Judaism and the right-wing secularist Yisrael Beytenu got seven seats apiece, while the left-wing Labor got six.

Squeezing past the electoral threshold with four seats each were the far-right Religious Zionists party, Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, the left-wing Meretz and the Islamist Ra’am. It was the first time Ra’am passed the electoral threshold in a Channel 12 survey.

Together Netanyahu’s right-wing religious bloc of Likud, Shas, UTJ and Religious Zionism had 49 seats. Even if Yamina were to join them, the parties would be short of the 61 seats needed for a majority in the 120-seat Knesset.

Parties that have ruled out joining a Netanyahu-led government had 57 seats without Bennett.

Asked who was best suited to be prime minister, 37 percent of respondents said Netanyahu, 21% Lapid, 10% Yamina chief Naftali Bennett and 9% Gideon Sa’ar, the head of New Hope.