Foreign Polls - Israel

One of the new additions I asked about in my user survey (I'll give more results soon, at the moment it's still open for people who haven't filled it in yet) was whether people wanted to see more foreign polls here to fill the gaps between British polling figures.

Obviously UKPollingReport is always going to be 99% about British polls, but to fill some of those gaps between polls being released I'm going to occassionally look at the polls in upcoming elections in other countries, so looking in the 2009 calender, that means places like Germany, Iceland and, to start off with, Israel.

Israel goes to the polls on the 11th February, an early election called after the failure of the new leader of Kadima, Tzipi Livni, to form a government. The outgoing Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, led a coalition mainly consisting of Kadima, Labor, Shas and - from 2006 to 2008 - the hard right Yisrael Beiteinu.

The polls since the election was called in October are shown below. You'll probably notice that the figures often sum to more than 100 - Israel has a famously pure version of proportional representation, a nationwide list system with a threshhold for representation of only 2%, and since share of the vote translates directly into seats it is the norm for polls to show projected seats, not percentage vote. There are 120 seats in total.

Since early in November Likud have been leading in the polls. The election period has obviously been dominated by the conflict with Hamas in Gaza, but this has not helped Kadima. Instead the parties that have benefitted since Israel began bombing Gaza on January 27th have been Labor, lead by the current Defence minister, Ehud Barak, and the hardline Yisrael Beiteinu.

It looks very likely that Likud will emerge the largest party, a big turnaround from the last election in 2006 when they were pushed into fourth place after the split in the party that formed Kadima. Naturally, it doesn't necessarily follow that Likud will be able to cobble together a coalition that wields a majority in the Knesset.

(And my apologies for any strange translations of pollsters' names, since many came via me putting Hewbrew text in the google translator :) )