JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a growing threat from centre-left rivals who have joined forces to try to oust the rightwing leader in snap elections, experts say.
Parliament on Monday set polling day for March 17, just over two years after Netanyahu's right-leaning coalition took office, and following a spat in which he fired two ministers and called the early vote.
The challenge will come from an alliance between Isaac Herzog's Labour party and the centrist HaTnuah of former justice minister Tzipi Livni, whom Netanyahu dismissed along with finance minister Yair Lapid.
Such a centre-left alliance would win 24 seats in the 120-member Knesset, polls published in Yediot Aharonot and Maariv newspapers said Friday, with the dailies respectively projecting 23 and 20 seats for Netanyahu's Likud.
"Unlike in the previous elections (January 2013), we have a common goal -- to replace Mr Netanyahu," Livni said in a television interview before the Labour-HaTnuah alliance was announced.
The latest poll numbers ignore the strong likelihood of Likud teaming up with other rightwing parties.
They do not indicate a shift in public opinion but rather simply the sum of each party's projected seats in a country that still favours the right, according to Denis Charbit, a politics professor at Israel's Open University.
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