The 15 parties that have a chance of entering the next Knesset intend to take
action over the next few days to grab the public’s attention for the final polls
that will be taken ahead of the January 22 general election.
The law
prohibits survey results from being published within four days of elections,
which makes Friday the last day for polls. The final polls, which will be seen
as the ultimate bellwether of the election, will be taken Monday, Tuesday and
Wednesday.
Former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman will be going to
Hebron and his Likud Beytenu will start a new campaign on billboards, and Labor
leader Shelly Yacimovich will be calling undecided voters herself at her party’s
Tel Aviv headquarters.
The Jerusalem Post’s last Smith Research poll
before the previous election, which was published February 6, 2009, predicted
that the Likud would be the largest party with 26 seats, followed by Kadima with
23. But thanks to a last-minute campaign under the slogan “It’s Tzipi [Livni] or
Bibi [Netanyahu],” Kadima took three seats away from Labor and two from Meretz,
defeating Likud 28 to 27.
Yisrael Beytenu fell significantly over the
last week of the last election from the 17- 18 seats predicted by the Post poll
and as many as 21 mandates predicted by a Geocartography poll.
Knesset
Speaker Reuven Rivlin warned Sunday that if Likud Beytenu does not win 40 seats in the election, three coalitions would be needed: One to pass the state
budget, one for the diplomatic process and one to ease the burden of IDF
service.
Sources close to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said he
wanted to form the widest coalition possible and would not disqualify any
Zionist party.
In radio interviews, Netanyahu denied reports that he had
already started building his next coalition.
Former foreign minister
Tzipi Livni, who at the beginning of the campaign had to be prodded to not rule
out joining a government led by Netanyahu, sounded eager to join his next
prospective coalition in radio interviews Sunday morning.
“The more votes
I have, the more I will be able to have influence on policies to make sure we
will work with the world, not against it,” Livni said. “I will decide to join
the coalition if I will receive guarantees that there will be a real diplomatic
process and I will have a serious impact on it.”
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