Israel’s opposition leader, Yitzhak Herzog, appears to be gaining momentum in the runup to next week’s general election, triggering a rising sense of panic in Likud, the party of the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.

Two new polls suggest a lead of three to four parliamentary seats for the Zionist Union, with internal polling from both parties indicating a wider gap.

A text message sent to Likud activists, imploring them to get friends and relatives to vote on Tuesday, reads: “We are in danger of really losing!”

It goes on: “We must save the day and make sure that every single one of our friends/acquaintances/family makes it to the polls on election day and votes for the Likud. Wake up!”

Herzog, the Labour leader who has formed an electoral alliance with former justice minister Tzipi Livni under the Zionist Union banner, has been running neck and neck with Netanyahu, who is campaigning to serve a fourth term as prime minister.

Under Israel’s system of proportional representation which invariably produces coalition governments, Netanyahu still has an advantage. But in the last days of the campaign, there is a new sense of optimism among Zionist Union’s supporters and MPs.

At a campaign meeting on Tuesday in Be’er Sheva, in the Negev desert, Herzog told a gathering of the faithful, the curious and a handful of supporters of other parties that he represented hope for those who felt excluded within Israel’s dysfunctional economy and for those who sought the possibility of peace. He and Livni promised to end Israel’s increasing isolation in the international community.

Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog addresses a rally in Be’er Sheva. Photograph: Peter Beaumont for the Guardian/Peter Beaumont

According to MP Erel Margalit, Zionist Union supporters were buoyed by the large turnout at an anti-Netanyahu rally in Tel Aviv at the weekend and by leaks of internal surveys that suggest Netayanhu’s position is worse than published polls suggest.

“I’ve become optimistic in the last few days,” Margalit said. “I wasn’t so optimistic before. In the last few days I have felt a sense of building momentum. I feel a change is coming. People want a leadership based on something else than fear.

“The sense of fatalism that has been around in a large part of the campaign – people thinking that whatever happens they will get Netanyahu as prime minister again – I think that is what has changed.”

Aron Klipper, 71, a retired engineer echoed Margalit’s sentiments. “I’m here because we desperately need a change of atmosphere in Israel. We need young people to be able to earn enough and afford places to live,” he said.

But with six days to go before the election, a key question is whether Herzog can defeat Netanyahu when it comes to the post-election horse-trading over forming a government.



In the tortured electoral mathematics of Israel’s coalition-building, Netanyahu still has a theoretical marginal advantage with six potential parties he can negotiate with to form a government, against Herzog’s five.

Young supporters of Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog cheer as he enters a rally of supporters in the Israeli town of Be’er Sheva on Tuesday night. Photograph: Peter Beaumont for the Guardian/Peter Beaumont

Among the factors that will come into play is whether some of the smallest parties – including the leftwing Meretz – win enough votes to meet the electoral threshold for representation in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

And if the election turns out as close as the polls currently suggest, President Reuven Rivlin could insist on negotiations for a national unity government embracing both Likud and Zionist Union.

Herzog has tried hard to increase his visibility in a campaign dominated by the personality of Netanyahu, not least in a long interview with the author and columnist Ari Shavit that sympathetically depicted the opposition leader munching peanuts for energy on the campaign trail and visiting Likud strongholds.

The stall Herzog has laid out has been a practical and emotional soft nationalism, open to negotiating a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and seeking a pragmatic middle way through Israel’s problems.

“I am a social democrat who wants both a free market and a just state. I am a pragmatist who tries to act fairly. I try to bring the contradictions into harmony and unity,” he told Shavit.

In contrast, rivals have often sounded inflammatory appeals, not least foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman on disloyal Israeli Arabs: “Those who are against us, there’s nothing to be done – we need to pick up an axe and cut off his head.”

In the last days of the campaign, Herzog has aimed his fire most heavily at the area where Netanyahu is seen as being most vulnerable – his failure to deal with Israel’s domestic problems.

But the party of his roots – Labour, the dominant political force in the early years of the Israeli state – has not occupied the prime minister’s office since Ehud Barak in 1999. Before that Israel had returned only one Labour prime minister since 1977 - Yitzhak Rabin.

“It used to be the thing that parties were from the cradle to grave,” said Einat Wilf, a former Labour MP and author of a book on Israel’s electoral system.

“Now they are built on shifting sands. People make their decision at the last minute or people vote for different parties from election to election.

“One reason is a global one: the end of ideology. So the party machines have declined and everywhere it has become much more personal. Large parties have became small and small parties have become large.”