The first polls after the Netanyahu indictment announcement by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit were bearable for Netanyahu. He was trailing Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid’s Kachol Lavan by a few seats, but the more important race between the broader center-left and right-wing blocs was a dead heat. Many suggested this was a swing of the moment and Netanyahu’s Likud and the right-wing bloc would bounce back, but five days later, today’s Hadashot poll conducted by pollsters Dr. Mina Tzemach and Mano Geva (Midgam) suggests nothing has changed.
Netanyahu’s path to a coalition remains unclear and though the Likud’s projected seat number has stayed the same for the most part since the indictment announcement, the right-wing bloc has shrunk by about four seats.
Right-wing voters have flocked to Netanyahu at the expense of smaller parties, and no one seems to have suffered as much as former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman. His Yisrael Beiteinu party has tanked since the indictment announcement and is now polling well below the electoral threshold, a threshold that he ironically advocated in order to prevent Arab parties from entering the Knesset. Naftali Bennett has also suffered, dropping to five seats in this latest poll (that would leave controversial Breitbart pundit Caroline Glick out of the Knesset, she’s at number six).
On the other hand, another group of centrist-leaning or soft-right Likud voters has moved to center-right parties Kachol Lavan and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu and though Kachol Lavan hasn’t increased in polls, the fact that it hasn’t dropped since the merger was announced two weeks ago is a positive sign.
By the looks of things, they have brought over votes from the Likud while ceding some votes to Avi Gabbay’s Labor, which has risen to nine seats. This will be fine by them as long as the center-left bloc is larger than the right, they remain the largest party themselves, and no other party in the bloc drops below the 3.25 percent threshold.
Full poll results can be found below.
Kachol Lavan 36
Likud 30
Labor 9
Hadash-Ta’al 8
UTJ 7
URL 6
Shas 6
Bayit Yehudi/United Right List 6
Kulanu 5
New Right 5
Meretz 4
United Arab List-Balad 4
Below 3.25% threshold
Gesher 2.25 percent
Zeut 2.0 percent
Yisrael Beiteinu 1.7 percent
Yachad 1.5 percent
This poll has been averaged into One Twenty’s data. You can find our polling averages here here.
