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Last poll before elections: Who gets the good news?

Netanyahu’s strategy of attacking smaller, right-wing satellite parties appears to be working.

By David Isaac, World Israel News

With five days to go before the election, the Kantor Institute released its final poll before Election Day (March 23). The winner looks be the Likud party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

According to the poll results, which were published by Kan News, the Likud strengthened to 31 seats; that’s two seats more than the party pulled in a March 11 Kantor poll.

It should be noted that while strengthening in the polls, the Likud party is projected to receive fewer Knesset seats than it currently controls (36).

Netanyahu’s strategy of attacking smaller, right-wing satellite parties, which he began to do in earnest at the tail end of the election campaign, appears to be working. He has struck against the parties of Yemina and New Hope in a bid to draw off votes.

The poll shows that Yemina, led by Naftali Bennett, has weakened to nine seats, down from 12 seats in the March 11 poll. New Hope, another right-wing party led by Gideon Saar, is also down to nine seats, a drop from 11 seats in the March 11 poll.

Netanyahu has attacked smaller right-wing parties ahead of each of the three elections (April 2019, September 2019, March 2020) which Israel has held.

In the first of the elections, April 2019, the tactic backfired as the New Right party, a Yemina precursor, collapsed and didn’t pass the electoral threshold (the minimum number of votes necessary to enter the Knesset), leaving Netanyahu with less than the 61 Knesset seats he required to form a governing coalition.

Had the New Right passed the threshold a right-wing coalition would have been formed and the additional elections would likely not have taken place.

However, as the latest poll shows, it appears that Yemina and New Hope will both pass the threshold. Whether this will help Netanyahu is another question as both have promised during the campaign not to join a Netanyahu-led government.

The poll also shows the next strongest party to Likud is Yesh Atid, led by Yair Lapid, with 19 seats. The party also received 19 seats in the March 11 poll.

The survey was conducted among 1,406 men and women aged 18 and over, in a combined online and telephone sample, including the Arab sector, from March 17 to March 18. The sampling error is 2.6%.