TV poll gives Barak’s party 6 Knesset seats

A Channel 13 poll, released just two hours after Barak announces his political comeback, gives the former PM’s unnamed party six of the Knesset’s 120 seats in the upcoming September elections.

The survey predicts that Likud and Blue and White receive 32 seats apiece; the Joint List gets 12; Yisrael Beytenu gets seven; Shas, UTJ and Meretz receive six seats each; Labor is down to five; the Union of Right-Wing Parties and New Right each get four seats.

The survey for the first time gives the center-left bloc an advantage with 61 seats, as opposed to the right-wing bloc (sans Liberman) which gets a mere 52.

But it was not immediately clear how the right could lose eight seats (down from 60 to 52) as compared to the outcome of the April elections and why the ultra-Orthodox parties would lose four seats among them by Barak’s entry.

Surveys have been proven to be wildly off-mark in previous national campaigns.