With less than a month left until the election, polls show that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t have the 61 seats he needs to form a majority right-wing government with his ultra-Orthodox allies. According to the average outcome of the most recent polls (as of Aug. 21), a right-wing, ultra-Orthodox coalition would win only 57 seats — four less than it needs.
The Likud believes that they can win those missing seats. They base this assumption on the results of the April election, in which two right-wing parties — the New Right of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, and Moshe Feiglin’s Zehut — failed to pass the electoral threshold, and “wasted’’ 256,000 votes, enough for roughly seven seats. Some of those seats are expected to transfer to the Rightward party (Yamina), the new merger of parties on the right, which includes Shaked and Bennett, but others will likely be lost. This is because Zehut wants to run alone again, with most polls giving it two seats, which is well below the electoral threshold of four seats (3.25% of all valid votes).
