New polls released Tuesday night on Israeli TV paint a difficult picture for Naftali Bennett, the chairman of the Together party, as his support continues to fall and Gadi Eisenkot widens his lead. In an i24NEWS poll conducted by Direct Polls, if elections were held now, Eisenkot’s Yashar party would win 18 seats, while Together would get only 12. The Democrats would come next with 11 seats, just one behind Bennett and Yair Lapid.
The same poll gave the Haredi parties 17 seats in total, 9 for Shas and 8 for United Torah Judaism. Direct Polls CEO Zuriel Sharon said the survey showed, for the first time, a significant number of Haredi voters saying they would not vote. He said this likely reflected frustration over the failure to address draft issues and the arrests of yeshiva students, adding that the Haredi voting machine, usually the bloc’s highest-turnout engine, was showing dangerous signs of erosion.
A separate Kan News and Kantar poll also showed Eisenkot surging, this time to 21 seats from 17 in the previous poll by the channel. Together dropped to 17 seats from 23, while The Democrats stayed at 9. The biggest shift was that Eisenkot became, for the first time, the largest party in the opposition camp, taking a four-seat lead over Bennett and cutting the gap with Likud to just two seats.
In the same Kan poll, respondents were asked who should lead the opposition bloc in the next election. Eisenkot led with 32%, Bennett followed with 22%, and 31% said neither should lead the bloc.
