As the election campaign  enters  the final lap, here are the latest predictions from the Israeli dailies Jerusalem Post and Haaretz :
Poll: Likud slips, but on course for win
Feb. 6, 2009
Gil Hoffman, The Jerusalem Post
The Likud will win an unexpectedly close race but the right-wing bloc will easily defeat the Left, according to a consensus of polls taken ahead of Friday, the last date polls can be published before Tuesday’s election.
A Jerusalem Post/Smith Research poll found that the Right would win some 65 seats, led by the Likud’s 26 and Israel Beiteinu’s 17-18. The Left would win some 55 seats, led by Kadima’s 23 and Labor’s 14.
Likud’s three-seat lead over Kadima is down from six mandates when the last Smith poll was published January 2. While Kadima has remained stagnant since then, Likud has lost three seats to Avigdor Lieberman’s resurgent Israel Beiteinu.
Other polls showed similar trends. A Panels poll taken for Channel 2′s Web site found that the gap between Likud and Kadima had fallen to only one seat, and a Dialogue poll taken for Ha’aretz put the gap at two. The largest gap between Likud and Kadima is six seats, in a Gal Hadash poll for Israel Hayom.
Lieberman continued to rise in nearly every poll, hitting a peak of 21 seats in a poll taken by the Geocartographic Institute for the Globes newspaper.
Read the whole article here »
Last update – 14:15 06/02/2009
Haaretz Poll: Kadima, Likud are neck-and-neck with 4 days to go
By Yossi Verter and Mazal Mualem
Likud and Kadima are in a neck-and-neck race to be the next Knesset’s largest party, according to the latest Haaretz-Dialog poll.
The poll, the last to be published before next Tuesday’s election, showed the gap between the two parties continuing to narrow: It is now down to only two seats in Likud’s favor.
In contrast, Avigdor Lieberman’s far-right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party continues to surge: The latest poll, which surveyed 1,000 people – double the usual number – showed it winning 18 seats, up from 15 last week. If this forecast proves accurate, Labor will be relegated, for the first time in its history, to the fourth-largest party, with only 14 seats.
The close race between the right-wing Likud and more centrist Kadima has finally injected some long-overdue excitement into the campaign. A few weeks ago, Likud seemed to have victory sewed up. Now it is in real danger of losing out to Kadima.
But when it comes to forming a coalition, Likud still has a clear edge over its rival: Even in the unlikely event of Lieberman choosing to throw his support behind Kadima chairwoman Tzipi Livni rather than Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, the only coalition Livni could form would be highly unstable. And without Lieberman, she has no coalition at all.
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