Polling Season in Israel

The Israeli media loves public opinion polls, especially polls of the electoral kind. So it should come as no surprise that, even before President Shimon Peres announced that Israel is headed for early elections, two polls of Israeli voting inclinations had already been published. A poll by Dahaf in the Yediot newspaper indicates that Israel's right-religious bloc may not prove as unbeatable as had widely been feared: Polls over the last year have given this bloc around 70 of the next Knesset's 120 seats, but Dahaf's new poll has this bloc at 60.

Here are the estimated results of the Knesset elections if voting took place today (a la Dahaf):

Right-Religious
Likud 26
Shas 11
Yisrael Beiteinu 9
National Union/National Religious Party 7
United Torah Judaism 7
Total 60

Center-Left
Kadima 29
Labor 11
Meretz 6
Greens 2
Pensioners 2
"Arab parties" 10
Total 60

(Sorry about the "Arab parties", but, in its reportage, Israel's Hebrew-language media generally doesn't bother to discriminate between three distinct parties, all of which find their main constituency among the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel - Hadash, Balad, and Ra'am-Ta'al.)

A poll by Teleseker showed Kadima with 31 seats, Likud with 29 and Labor with 11.