After the Kadima party's leaders brought Israel a retreat from Gaza with disastrous results and a historic failure in the second Lebanon War, one wonders what it would take for Israelis to punish the party in the polls:
Poll: Kadima and Likud neck and neck:
A new poll published Friday puts Kadima and Likud neck and neck.
The poll, conducted by the TNS Teleseker firm for Ma'ariv and coming hot on the heels of the Kadima primary, predicted that the parties of Tzipi Livni and Binyamin Netanyahu would each win 30 seats.
Based on those numbers, the number of seats that the parties' possible coalition partners would receive becomes crucial:
It also showed that Labor and Yisrael Beiteinu would each get 12 mandates, Shas would win nine and Meretz - running with the new Hatnua Hahadasha - would win seven.
That brings the total to 100. Based on other recent polls the other 20 seats in the Israeli Knesset would probably be split roughly 50/50 between the Arab parties and religious or right-wing parties. Overall that points to a close balance between the Left/Arab and Right/Religious blocks, with the caveats that the Arab parties have never been in a government and that at least one religious party would be likely to join a Left-wing government if it could be formed.
800 people were interviewed for the poll. The margin of error was the equivalent of two parliament seats.
The polls in Israel have been clearly slanted to the Left in just about every national election at least since 1992. If that holds true and the other factors above are taken into consideration, the Likud probably has a slight edge over Kadima.
Livni is a polical lightweight who effortlessly jumped from being a life-long Likudnik to a "peaceloving" Kadima leader for political expediency. (Most of Kadima's MK's could be described in a very similar manner.) Her only achievement to date is that she is a media darling who incorrectly was not blamed for her share in the recent fiasco in Lebanon. Yet she is running close to a tie against the much more serious and experienced Netanyahu and trouncing former Prime Minister Ehud Barak from Labor.
Does this mean that Israelis have been asleep for the last few years as Kadima's leaders have botched their jobs just about as thoroughly as possible? Or does it reflect on their lack of satisfaction with Netanyahu and Barak, both of whom were ignomiously tossed out of office at the end of their first terms as Prime Minister?
