The alliance announced Sunday between the Blue and White and New Hope parties will not create a major political shift between the Right and Center-Left blocs, a poll by Channel 12 News said.
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Israel will hold its next general election – the country's fifth in three years – on Nov. 1.
Monday's poll projected that were elections held at this time, Likud would win 34 Knesset seats, followed by Yesh Atid (23), Blue and White-New Hope (13), the Religious Zionist Party (10), Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party Shas (8), Ashkenazi Haredi party United Torah Judaism (7), the Joint Arab List (6), Yisrael Beytenu (6), Labor (5), Ra'am (4), and Meretz (4).
Former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's Yamina party – now under the leadership of Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked – fails to cross the four-seat electoral threshold.
Shaked tweeted Monday that she will "share some good, important, and surprising news very soon. For now, all I can say is that we are in the race all the way, for this country and the people."
The poll's results showed that the political blocs are expected to remain steady overall, with 59 mandates for the Right and 54 for the Center-Left bloc. This excludes the Joint Arab List's six mandates: the Arab party is unlikely to join either coalition, but could still back a candidate to form a government once the results of the elections become clear.
Such close results have led to a prolonged political crisis in Israel. The government formed by Bennett and now-caretaker PM Yair Lapid sought to end the cycle of elections by ousting then-PM Benjamin Netanyahu after 12 years in office and four elections that saw him fail to form a right-wing government.
The coalition, however, soon proved dysfunctional, with Bennett's own MKs going rogue and undermining his already fragile majority to the point of crippling the government. In late June, Bennett announced snap elections, saying that the efforts to stabilize the increasingly erratic coalition – in power for only a year – have been exhausted.
The Knesset dissolved on June 30, giving way to Lapid to take over as head of the transitional government that will see Israel through the elections.
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