Israeli Press
Tuchfeld says Netanyahu's chance of a 61-seat majority has collapsed
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Israel's public moved right after 7 October 2023 and Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition still cannot assemble a majority from it, the Maariv commentator Matti Tuchfeld wrote on Sunday.
The statistical model his column cites puts the coalition's probability of reaching 61 seats at 11.05 percent, against 21.38 percent for the opposition.
The gap Tuchfeld describes is not ideological but electoral. On the positions themselves the right-wing bloc should in theory command 70 to 75 seats; in the polling it does not come close, because between 15 and 25 seats' worth of right-wing voters refuse to vote for the parties in government.
Campaign headquarters have identified two reasons for the leak, in his account. One is the composition of the Likud list. The other is the alliance with the haredi parties, which repels part of the electorate; 39 percent of Jewish voters, he wrote, reject Otzma Yehudit outright.
Undecided voters are drifting the same way, and above all toward Gadi Eisenkot's party. Right-wing voters still sitting out, Tuchfeld concluded, are not automatically ready to come home to the parties that represent their views.
For Palestinian readers the arithmetic carries a warning inside the good news. What Tuchfeld measures is not a public turning away from the right's programme of settlement and permanent control, but a public unwilling to hand that programme to this particular coalition.
