If elections were held today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition would be reelected, according to a poll published on Sunday evening by Channel 14 and conducted by Direct Polls.
The latest survey found that if elections were conducted now, Netanyahu’s Likud Party would receive 31 Knesset seats, Benny Gantz’s National Resilience Party, 15; Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beiteinu, 15; Aryeh Deri’s Shas, 15; Yair Golan’s The Democrats, 10; opposition leader Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, 9; United Torah Judaism, 8; Otzma Yehudit, 6; Religious Zionism, 5; Ra’am, (United Arab List), 5; and Hadash-Ta’al Arab list, 5.
The disparity between Netanyahu’s right-religious bloc and the Lapid-Gantz center-left bloc stands at 61 to 49 seats, with 10 seats polling for two Arab parties.
Since the Sept. 19 poll, Yisrael Beiteinu gained two projected seats, while the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas Party rose by one seat. Gantz’s party lost two projected mandates since the previous Direct Polls survey. Golan’s The Democrats, a party founded some two months ago following the merger of the Labor Party and Meretz, went from 11 mandates in the Sept. 19 poll to 10 now, while Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid is down one seat.
Likud has held 32 seats in the Knesset since the 2022 general election, in addition to the 32 seats held by its right-wing and religious allies.
In head-to-head suitability for prime minister match-ups, Netanyahu now leads Gantz 52%-25%. He leads opposition leader Lapid 54%-24%.
The poll was conducted before Gideon Sa’ar brought his United Right Party, with four Knesset members, into Netanyahu’s government. Sa’ar will serve as a minister without portfolio. His party has not crossed the 3.25% (4-seat) threshold for entrance to the legislature in any poll for the past 10 months, and is polling less than one Knesset seat in the latest Direct Polls survey. Sa’ar’s move increases the size of the governing coalition from 64 to 68 Knesset seats.
Direct Polls tracking polls of Knesset seats have shown a consistent plurality of seats for Netanyahu’s coalition for several months. But Sunday’s poll marked the first time that the parties in Netanyahu’s
Right-Religious bloc received 61 mandates required to form a government. A poll conducted for Channel 14 last Thursday—before Netanyahu’s U.N. address and before the IAF strike in Beirut that
killed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah—placed Netanyahu’s coalition at 60 seats.
The next Israeli national vote must be held by Oct. 27, 2026, unless the Netanyahu-led government falls and early elections are called.
While 60% of Israelis are dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the ongoing conflicts on the southern and northern borders, the majority believes that early elections would hurt the war effort, according to a poll conducted by Direct Polls for JNS in July.
Fifty-four percent of respondents said that a vote before the end of the wars with Hamas and Hezbollah would “hurt” (9%) or be “very harmful” for (45%) Israel’s deterrence in the face of ongoing terrorist threats.
Direct Polls, which correctly predicted the results of Israel’s most recent election in November 2022, surveyed a representative sample of 520 Israeli adults on Sept. 29. (The margin of error is plus or minus 4.6 percentage points at a confidence level of 95%, Direct Polls said.)
