On 7 March, with 10 days to go before the Israeli election, the former head of Mossad (Israel’s equivalent of MI6) Meir Dagan spoke to a 30,000 strong Peace Now rally to call for the removal of Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “He is dragging us down to a bi-national state and to the end of the Zionist dream,” said Dagan, close to tears.

In the crowd was my mother, who told me afterwards: “I didn’t think there was a chance before, but maybe, maybe Bibi will be removed.”

In December last year, at the start of campaigning, I wrote a piece for this blog titled Eight reasons why the centre-left could form Israel’s next government. Some of my friends in Israel thought I was being a tad over-optimistic.

Although the formation of the Zionist Union (a merger of the Labour Party and centrist Hatnuah) united the centre-left and turned the election into a two horse race, it still looked more likely that Netanyahu would form the government. However, the latest polls indicate that Zionist Union appear to be pulling ahead: with 26 predicted seats in elections to Israel’s 120 seat Knesset, while Likud’s share of the vote appears to be plummeting from a high of 27 to around 21.

This gap is significant, with such a gap over Likud, it would be difficult for Israel’s President Rivlin not to ask Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog to have the first attempt at forming a coalition.

This is a sharp contrast from a few months ago, where, despite a seemingly endless stream of bad news for Netanyahu – reports of extortionate spending at the prime minister’s residence, a major report into the country’s housing crisis, and the public disagreements with the Obama – nothing seemed to stick. Israel’s most popular satire show Eretz Nehederet even produced a song which in many ways reflected the semi-despairing mood of the Israeli-centre left ‘No Matter what I do, you’ll still vote for me’.

How things have changed. “This campaign was a colossal failure. Netanyahu is primarily responsible,”lamented a senior Likud Party official recently. In this election campaign, Likud – unlike virtually all other political parties in Israel – have not focused on socio-economic issues, the dominant issue of this electoral cycle.

Instead, they have adopted what many perceive to be a much more negative campaign: including controversial adverts suggesting that the left would bring ISIS closer to Jerusalem and comparing public sector workers to Hamas (which they subsequently apologised for and removed); all of this without publishing a manifesto of their own.

“The public needs to grow up and stop believing in rosy dreams,” said Likud member of Knesset Zeev Elkin at one debate. “Without rosy dreams, there would be no State of Israel,” responded Zionist Union MK Stav Shaffir.

Read the article in full at Left Foot Forward.