Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former foreign
minister Avigdor Lieberman's joint Likud-Beytenu list continued its downward
spiral in a Smith Research poll taken Tuesday and Wednesday for The Jerusalem
Post and the economic newspaper Globes.
When the 27-seat Likud and
15-seat Yisrael Beytenu joined forces on October 25, the two parties' American
strategist Arthur Finkelstein predicted that the joint list would win 47 seats
in the January 22 election. But the Post's polls forecast 37 seats after the
announcement, 34 last Friday, and now a new low of only 32 seats.
Labor
also kept on falling, winning only 17 seats, compared to 18 last week and 22 at
the end of October. Bayit Yehudi continued its surge forward, nearly passing
Labor into second place with 16 seats, compared to 14 last week and nine at the
end of October. The rest of the parties remained relatively consistent.
The poll of a statistical sample of the adult Israeli
population has a four percent margin of error.