Poll Shows Narrow Likud Lead as Netanyahu Regains Ground, Bennett Slips

A new Maariv seats poll shows Likud still narrowly ahead, with Benjamin Netanyahu’s party on 22 seats and Gideon Eisenkot’s new Yashar! party just one seat behind on 21. Naftali Bennett’s Yachad! party is third with 18 seats, keeping it a key kingmaker in the next Knesset.

Further down, Yisrael Beiteinu under Avigdor Liberman takes 11 seats, The Democrats led by Yair Golan get 10, and Otzma Yehudit led by Itamar Ben Gvir wins 9. The ultra-Orthodox parties remain in single digits, with Shas on 8 and United Torah Judaism on 7.

At the bottom of the table, Hadash-Ta’al has 6 seats, while Ra’am and Religious Zionism led by Bezalel Smotrich scrape past the threshold with 4 seats each. In bloc terms, neither side reaches the 61 seats needed to form a government alone: the Netanyahu bloc stands at 50, the anti-Netanyahu bloc at 60, and the Arab parties together hold the remaining 10.

The poll also tested a joint run by Yachad! and Yashar! under Bennett’s leadership, and found the combined list would win only 33 seats, one fewer than in the previous poll. That is six seats less than the two parties would take separately, a result that would hurt the anti-Netanyahu bloc, which would fall to 58 seats, while Netanyahu’s bloc would rise to 52.