According to two polls released on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party has narrowed the gap with former Minister Benny Gantz’s centrist party, which withdrew from the unity government on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The polls for the left-wing Ma\u2019ariv daily and the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper showed Likud winning 21 seats behind the National Unity Party on 24.<\/p>\n
The Ma\u2019ariv poll last week showed Mr Gantz\u2019s party on 27 seats, while at the start of the year, it was regularly polling in the high 30s.<\/p>\n
The Ma\u2019ariv poll shows the current ruling coalition winning 52 seats in the 120-seat Knesset against 58 for the main opposition parties. The United Arab List and the left-wing Hadash-Ta\u2019al alliance hold the remaining 10 seats.<\/p>\n
The Israel Hayom poll put the coalition on 50 seats against 61 for the opposition parties and 9 for the UAL and Hadash-Ta\u2019al.<\/p>\n
Both polls showed a majority of voters would prefer Mr Gantz as prime minister in a head-to-head choice with Mr Netanyahu.<\/p>\n
However, the Israel Hayom poll showed that if former prime minister Naftali Bennett were to join forces with Avigdor Liberman and Gideon Saar, two other centre-right politicians from outside the Likud camp, their alliance could beat both Likud and Mr Gantz\u2019s National Unity Party.<\/p>\n
Mr Gantz, a former army general and defence minister in the last government, joined Mr Netanyahu\u2019s coalition last year as a gesture of national unity following the devastating attack by Hamas on October 7.<\/p>\n
However, he clashed repeatedly with other ministers and quit the government after demanding Mr Netanyahu articulate a clear strategic plan for the war in Gaza, now in its ninth month.<\/p>\n
Mr Netanyahu, who was widely blamed for the security failures that allowed the October 7 attack to take place, has refused to call early elections and would not normally face voters until 2026 if his coalition with a clutch of religious and right-wing pro-settler parties holds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to two polls released on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party has narrowed the gap with former Minister Benny Gantz’s centrist party, which withdrew from the unity government on Sunday. The polls for the left-wing Ma\u2019ariv daily and the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper showed Likud winning 21 seats behind the National […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":34898,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[249],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34896"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34899,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34896\/revisions\/34899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}