Channel 13 poll conducted two days before parties must submit their finalized electoral slates and 49 days before the March 23 elections.
Labor for weeks had been predicted to fall below the electoral threshold and fail to make it into the Knesset, but the party has been rising in the polls since MK Merav Michaeli won in its leadership primary last week.
According to Tuesday’s poll, Likud was projected to win 29 seats, down three from Channel 13’s previous survey.
The center-left Yesh Atid and right-wing New Hope were neck-and-neck with 16 seats apiece; Yamina and the Arab-majority Joint List both picked up 10 seats; Labor climbed to eight seats; United Torah Judaism picked up eight; Shas and Yisrael Beytenu, seven seats each; Meretz, five; and Blue and White hovered near the electoral threshold with four seats.
Ron Huldai’s The Israelis, Ofer Shelah’s Tnufah, far-right parties led by Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir and Yaron Zelekha’s New Economics all failed to cross the threshold. Moshe Ya’alon said Monday that he and his Telem party would quit, after the faction repeatedly polled beneath the electoral threshold.
According to the survey, a coalition of Yesh Atid, New Hope, Yamina, Labor, Yisrael Beytenu, and Blue and White would win 61 seats, giving it a majority in the Knesset. With the left-wing Meretz, it would pick up 66.
Toying with other possibilities, Tuesday’s Channel 13 survey tested what would happen if several small far-right parties merged, and if the Ra’am party ran independently from the Joint List, in what is seen as Netanyahu’s optimal scenario.
The union of far-right parties would win six seats in such an alliance, and Ra’am would win four, it predicted. Yet it still found Likud unable to form a coalition, forecasting that an outcome like this could foretell a fifth round of elections.
Asked who was best-suited to be prime minister, 35% of respondents said Netanyahu, 16% said New Hope’s Gideon Sa’ar, 9% said Yamina’s Naftali Bennett, 7% said Blue and White’s Benny Gantz, and just 4% said opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party.
If a government is formed by Netanyahu’s rivals, 23% preferred Sa’ar to lead it; 20% said Bennett, and 19% said Lapid. But a plurality, 27%, said none of the candidates.
