Poll: Parties opposing PM would win Knesset majority without Ra’am if elections held

Parties opposed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-religious government would win enough seats to form a new majority coalition if elections were held today, even without the support of the predominantly Arab Ra’am and Hadash-Ta’al factions, according to a television survey aired this evening.

Netanyahu’s Likud party was forecast to be the largest in the Channel 12 news poll with 22 seats, followed by four opposition factions: National Unity with 21 seats, Yesh Atid with 15, Yisrael Beytenu with 14 and the Democrats (a union of Labor and Meretz) with 11.

Taken together, the opposition parties had 61 Knesset seats in the survey, enough for a bare majority in the 120-member parliament.

The next largest parties in the poll were Shas at 10 seats, Otzma Yehudit at nine, and United Torah Judaism at eight. The three factions are all part of the current coalition, together with the far-right Religious Zionism party, which failed to clear the minimum vote threshold in the poll.

Rounding out the survey are Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am, with five seats apiece.

The survey also asked how respondents would vote when a theoretical party led by former premier Naftali Bennett is included among the options, with the results showing coalition parties would receive 46 seats instead of the 49 they pick up without him in the poll.

The survey, by pollster Manu Geva, included 503 respondents and had a 4.4% margin of error.