Middle East

Showing Benjamin Netanyahu several seats short of a clear path to a majority coalition, the three TV exit polls published at the end of voting on Tuesday night suggested that Israeli politics have been thrown wide open after a decade of his rule. If, that is, they are accurate.

Five months ago, two of the three polls proved fairly close to the actual results, while the third, on Channel 12, significantly overestimated the prime ministerial prospects of Blue and White centrist party leader Benny Gantz. Tuesday’s polls, by contrast, were fairly consistent, and all of them showed Netanyahu in trouble.

Blue and White immediately hailed a revolution. “The Netanyahu era is over,” said one of its Knesset members, former Netanyahu aide Yoaz Hendel. Netanyahu’s Likud, by contrast, was unsurprisingly taking a wait-and-see attitude. Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, for instance, professed he was “convinced” that the genuine results, flowing in over the next few hours, would show the TV polls to be wrong, and that Netanyahu would continue to lead Israel “for the next five years.”

Indeed, past elections have frequently seen Likud support underestimated in TV polls, and rising with the real results. Most famously, in 1996, Labor’s Shimon Peres, assuming the exit polls were accurate, went to bed believing he had won the election, and woke up to find that Netanyahu had narrowly defeated him.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/if-exit-polls-are-right-netanyahu-is-in-trouble-but-theyve-been-wrong-before/