Hypothetical party of anti-overhaul protest leaders polls at 10 Knesset seats

A hypothetical party led by prominent members of the major protest movement against the current government’s judicial overhaul plan would win 10 Knesset seats, a survey showed Saturday.

However, those seats would be taken from existing opposition parties that staunchly oppose the overhaul anyway, and the overall division of power between the main parliamentary camps would remain unchanged, according to the Channel 12 poll.

The protest movement hasn’t indicated it is interested in entering the national political arena, and many of its hundreds of thousands of supporters from across the political spectrum believe doing so would be a mistake.

Israel’s opinion polls can often be unreliable, but they influence politicians and voters. No elections are currently scheduled for the next three years.

When surveying the current parties, the poll predicted that Benny Gantz’s National Unity party would win 28 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, the most of any party, if elections were held today — surpassing Likud, which ranked next with 26 seats.

Among coalition parties, the ultra-Orthodox Shas polled at 10 seats; the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism, 7; and the far-right Otzma Yehudit-Religious Zionism at 9 seats.

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party polled in third place, with 20 seats; Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu would get 5 seats; the Arab Hadash-Ta’al faction, 5; the Islamist Ra’am, 5; and left-wing Meretz, 4. The center-left Labor and Arab Balad parties were not predicted to receive enough backing to cross the electoral threshold and win seats in the Knesset.

The parties in the current coalition would win 52 seats, far short of their current total of 64. The opposition parties would win 63 seats, without Hadash-Ta’al, which is not aligned with the rest of the opposition. The figures, which are similar to those observed in many other recent polls, would give the current opposition parties enough of a majority to form a coalition.

In a lineup including the theoretical protest party, which presumably could be led by protest leaders Shikma Bressler and Moshe Radman, that party received 10 seats — four taken from Meretz, which would fail to enter the Knesset, three from Yesh Atid, two from National Unity and one from Yisrael Beytenu.

The poll was carried out by the Midgam research firm along with online polling firm iPanel. The network didn’t detail on its website the number of respondents or the margin of error.