Lapid soars in Israel's pre-election polls
With the spirit of the 2011 social justice protests still alive, Yesh Atid head Yair Lapid succeeds in overcoming the negative image of his performance as finance minister, and gathers momentum ahead of the elections.
Some of the key Israeli political parties ran internal polls at the end of February, to examine the effect of the state comptroller’s report on the failure of the housing crisis. These polls repeatedly had interesting data regarding Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid Party.
The right-wing parties — the Likud, HaBayit HaYehudi and Yisrael Beitenu — showed a weakening trend, and the votes did not remain in the right-wing bloc. And contrary to expectations, Moshe Kahlon's social justice Kulanu Party, with its right-wing Likud orientation, did not increase its strength significantly. It turns out that the votes have been seeping to the party of Lapid, finance minister until December 2014.
This constitutes an average increase of about two seats for Yesh Atid compared with previous surveys, but it also indicates an interesting trend: the flow of seats from the right-wing bloc to Lapid, who is viewed as a key player in the left-center bloc. If this flow of votes continues, it could prove to be significant the day after the elections. In internal surveys conducted by Yesh Atid’s American pollster Mark Mellman, the party is now third in size with a projected 14 seats, and its support has grown at the expense of soft center-right (mainly Likud) voters and former fence-sitting undecided voters. According to Mellman, the growth potential has not yet been exhausted.
But that's not all. Even the Zionist Camp, headed by Isaac Herzog, has noted that voters are seeping away from it and toward Lapid. This is the reason the Zionist Camp decided to shift some of its campaign fire to him as well. Over the last few weeks, the Zionist Camp has found itself somewhere between barely holding its own and suffering a certain amount of erosion. Zionist Camp seniors are worried because according to their calculations, they must win at least four seats more than the Likud to be asked by the president to form the next government. Meanwhile, Zionist Camp co-chairs Herzog and Tzipi Livni have not succeeded in attracting right-wing voters to their list; the additional seats they are projected to pick up are from the left-wing bloc, mainly the leftist Meretz Party.
