Israel’s political divide correlates strongly with the country’s Jewish religious spectrum, a new study of the 2022 election found, showing that the more religious voters were, the likelier they were to vote for the current right-wing coalition, and vice versa.

The study by the Israel Democracy Institute, published Sunday, comes a few months before Israelis are due to head to the ballot box again. Polls show a competitive race between the ruling bloc of right-wing and religious parties that support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the largely centrist, left-wing and secularist parties that hope to unseat him.

In the 2022 election, coalition parties won 64 out of the Knesset’s 120 seats, while opposition parties won 56. Netanyahu’s Likud party won 32 seats, the most of any party, while the opposition centrist Yesh Atid won 24.

The survey found that Haredi voters were the most likely to support coalition parties, while secular voters were most likely to support the opposition.

Eighty percent of the coalition parties’ voters were Haredi, religious Zionist or traditional Jews, while 73.5% of the opposition’s voters were secular. Likud, which has roots as a right-wing secular party, relied to a large extent on traditional and religious voters.

“Against the backdrop of the strengthening of ‘tribal’ trends in Israeli society, which are based to a large extent on the division of Israeli society into different groups along religious lines, it is especially important in Israel to examine the relationship between voting and the variable of religious self-definition,” the study’s author,........

© The Times of Israel