Poll Predicts Joint List Will Be 3rd Largest Knesset Bloc after Election

A poll released by Kan News on Sunday evening, September 1, found that if the Knesset elections were held then, the third largest parliamentary block in Israel’s Knesset would be the Joint List with 11 seats. Ahead of it would be the far-right Likud with 32 seats in the 22nd Knesset, making it the party with the most representatives, and Kahol-Lavan (Blue & White) which would trail the Likud by a single seat with 31 MKs.

Dozens of English-speaking Joint List supporters in Jerusalem came to meet with Hadash MK Aida Touma-Sliman, number 5 of the list's candidates, on August 18, 2019.

Dozens of English-speaking Joint List supporters in Jerusalem came to meet with Hadash MK Aida Touma-Sliman, number 5 of the list’s candidates, on August 18, 2019. (Photo: Zo Hederech)

According to the same poll, the Democratic Union alliance between Meretz and Ehud Barak’s Israel Democratic party would win 7 seats. The haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, would remain stable with 7, the same number that each of these two ultra-orthodox won in the April elections. The Labor-Gesher alliance headed by Amir Peretz and Orly Levy-Abekasis would win 6 seats. The Racist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party did not pass the electoral threshold (3.25%) in the poll, those participating in the poll giving it less than 3% of the vote.

The poll examined where the voters of the libertarian and far-right Zehut party went following the party’s withdrawal from the race, and found that they had dispersed to the Likud, to the fanatically national religious Yamina (Rightward), but also to Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beytenu and Blue & White. The poll was conducted for Kan News by the Kantar Institute on September 1, 2019, from a nation-wide sample of the Israeli population aged 18 and over.