The Likud is continuing to plummet in the polls, capturing a mere nineseats in the latest Haaretz-Dialogue survey, while Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Kadima Party continues to gain strength. The poll, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday among 500 voters, found that if elections were held now, Kadima would win 37 seats, compared to nine for the Likud. Some 65 percent of those who voted Likud in 2003 said that they planned to vote Kadima this time, while only 16 percent said that they definitely plan to stick with the Likud. For the Likud, this is close to an all-time low: Only in the second Knesset, in the 1950s, did its predecessor, Herut, fare worse. In that Knesset, Herut had eight seats. The poll results are causing panic in the Likud. Senior Likud officials fear a mass defection of party activists to Kadima if the trend does not reverse soon a development that would destroy the party’s organizational infrastructure. However, unlike Kadima and Labor, Likud has not yet chosen its prime ministerial candidate a fact that might be contributing to its poor poll numbers. Moreover, the general situation is still highly unstable, with peopleswitching between parties continuously, and is likely to remain so for the next several weeks. The poll, conducted under the supervision of Professor Camil Fuchs, also found that Labor is currently holding firm at 26 seats, while Shinui continues to shrink, and would now win only five seats. Half of Shinui’s voters have switched to Kadima. Shas is also holding steady: It won 10 seats in this week’s poll, compared to 11 in the current Knesset; the seat it lost went to Labor. As the campaign proceeds, the Likud will try to paint Kadima as a leftist party, hoping thereby to regain some of the voters it has lost to Sharon. Benjamin Netanyahu, one of the party’s six leadership candidates, set the tone last night when he responded to the statement by Sharon that he would not carry out another unilateral withdrawal. „Sharon said such things before, but he still withdrew, and he’ll withdraw again,” Netanyahu said.
BPI-info
BPI-info
