If there were a negative reaction on the part of Likud voters to the AG’s announcement regarding the indictments against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – it has faded away. Also faded is the forceful effect of the union between Benny Gantz and Yair lapid. The result: Blue and White has lost the steam and with it the sense of inevitability it used to project, while Likud is holding on to its established share of votes. This according to a survey published Saturday night by Haaretz, conducted last Thursday by Dialog, under the supervision of Prof. Camil Fuchs.
The survey contacted 800 respondents on the phone and online, with a +/- 3.5% sampling error.
In fact, as Haaretz pointed out, Blue and White is approaching the size of the late Kadima party, led by Ehud Olmert and later Tzipi Livni: 29 and 28 seats in the 2006 and 2009 elections, respectively. Without a major game-changer, this is where they will likely finish.
With those numbers, Gantz is looking at a year, at least, on the opposition benches – unless he breaks his vow to his “anyone but Bibi” voters and seeks to join the Netanyahu government. This also happens to be the election slogan of the parties of the right of Bibi, who tell their voters the first phone call Bibi would make on April 10 would be to Gantz.
The Haredi and right-wing bloc has captured the lead, this time without Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, who hasn’t seen the safe side of the threshold vote for weeks. Liberman has been saying that the pollsters don’t reach his voters. Could be. Another possibility is that his voters, mostly Russian immigrants, are dying out, and their children are not identifying themselves as Russians first.
Many of them show up at Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut party rallies and meetings. Zehut continues its momentum, sitting pretty in the four-seats plus area, while claiming that its own deep-root polling shows double this number. The party’s platform is the leading best seller in Israel’s bookstores.
Netanyahu, who did everything in his power to get rid of Likud MK Moshe Feiglin—exiling him from all his committee jobs—will now have to embrace, however reluctantly, Moshe Feiglin the coalition partner, who will leverage against him his unabashed threat to walk across the street to Gantz’s store.
With 5 to 8 seats, Feiglin could drive a hard bargain, and make good on his demand for the finance and education portfolio, as well as Bibi’s iron-clad commitment to push the legalization of cannabis – not just medical, but leisure as well.
