http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... ction.htmlBenjamin Netanyahu behind in final polls before Israel's election
Final opinion polls put Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party four seats behind its centre-left rivals, days before the general election.
The top-selling Yediot Aharonot showed Likud’s main challenger, the Zionist Union coalition, winning 26 of the 120 seats in parliament against 22 for the Israeli prime minister's party.
Its survey, published on Friday, of 1,032 respondents by pollster Mina Tzemach put The Joint List, a newly formed alliance of Israel’s main Arab parties, in third, with 13 seats.
The poll had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, the paper said.
A Panels Research poll published jointly by The Jerusalem Post and Maariv dailies showed the same four-seat gap between parties, with the Zionist Union winning 25 against 21 for Likud.
The survey of 1,300 people also saw The Joint List winning 13 places. It had a margin of error of 3.0 per cent.
Friday is the final day that opinion polls may legally be published before the vote.
The Zionist Union fuses the Labour party of Isaac Hertzog with the centrist HaTnuah led by Tzipi Livni, formerly Israel’s chief peace negotiator with the Palestinians.
Recent polls had put it two to three places ahead of Likud. A Thursday survey by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper gave the Zionist Union 24 seats to Likud’s 21.
The Joint List was third with 13 seats.
Israel’s electoral system means that the government is not formed by the largest party, but by whichever party leader can build a coalition commanding a parliamentary majority.
I for one would be delighted to see the back of Benjamin Netanyahu. I am a staunch supporter of Israel, but I do not believe that Israel's strategic interests have been at all well served by this implacable foe of any meaningful dialog with the Palestinians. His policy of unending settlement expansion has made it absolutely impossible for any Palestinian leader to negociate with him, and he likes it that way. A new approach is definitely needed.
That having been said, if one looks at that chart, the Zionist Union coalition leading Likud by four seats is pretty much meaningless. (It also seems kind silly to talk about "major parties" when one has 26 and the other has 22 but 61 are needed to form the government...Israel is the world's greatest argument against a genuine multi-party system; parties that represent the tiniest sliver of popular support wind up with vastly outsized influence as the larger blocs try to win them over to cobble together a majority. There's nothing particularly "democratic" about giving parties with tiny popular support more influence than their numbers justify.)
If you look at that chart, and you take the 26 Zionist Union seats, and you add in the 17 "others" on the left side, (which I assume represents a hodgepodge of liberal or leftist teeny weenie parties and independents) and if on top of that you throw in the 13 seats for the Arab parties, you still only come up with 56 seats, which is five short of the majority needed...
On the other hand, if you add the 22 Likud seats to the 29 "others" on the right side of the chart, (which I assume represents a hodgepodge of conservative or rightist teeny weenie parties and independents) you're already up to 51, meaning that all Netanyahu has to do is peel off 10 of the 13 seats from the teenie weenie religious parties to form a majority. Which will of course involve giving these teenie weenie religious parties way more influence over policy then they would deserve based on their electoral support.
And even if the Zionist Union bloc were to form the government, they couldn't do it without at least five seats from the religious party group, which would once again involve giving them way more influence than they deserve.
But it's highly questionable that this could even be possible, because if you do the math, the only way the Zionist Unionists can form a government, (even if they win more seats than Likud) is if they some how manage to get both the Arab parties and at least some of the Religious parties into their coalition. That seems extremely problematic, but Israeli politics has produced strange bed fellows before...
Another theoretical possibility would be a National Unity government consisting of both the Zionist Unionists and Likud, (there's some precedent for this; Labor led by Shimon Peres and Likud led by Yitzak Shamir tried this in the late 80s) but even if you add their totals together you only get to 49 meaning that some combination of at least 12 of the teenie weenies or independents would still be needed to form a government. (Granting them of course, out-sized influence over policy)
But even this is a very remote possibility because "national unity" ain't the way Bibi rolls...
The only advantage Zionist Union would get from finishing ahead of Likud in the seat count is that it might mean that the Israeli President (who is himself a member of the Labor party) would give them first crack at forming a government. But as you can see, if the numbers wind up being what the latest polling indicates, their chances of achieving this are pretty slim....
If this polling accurately reflects the final outcome, (and perhaps it won't; maybe what we're seeing in these numbers is the beginning of voter trend away from Likud, and by the time the vote is held in several days, they will actually perform worse than indicated by these numbers) the most likely result is that in a couple of weeks there will be a new Israeli government that looks almost identical to the old Israeli government...
A Likud led right-wing hardliner coalition, with Netanyahu as PM and a hand full of religious party types bought off by giving them more power than they deserve based on their support.
Which seems like a pretty depressing prospect to me, but it is what it is...
We have a relatively minor political problem in this country currently with the Tea Party types exercising out-sized political influence within the Republican Party in Congress....
What the Israelis have with their system is the Tea Party problem on steroids; with extremists of all varieties that have only tiny popular, support having to be courted and mollified just to even get a government formed... I don't feel particularly envious of that...
Thanks, but no thanks...
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