Poll: Most Labor supporters believe Barak should stay in government
Poll probing Israelis' post-Winograd political pulse reveals two-thirds of Labor supporters want Ehud Barak to remain in office, but 52% of general public would prefer he quit government. Olmert's support rises slightly, but 56% still believe he should resign
The majority of Labor supporters believe Labor Chief and Defense Minister Ehud Barak should not resign the government.
A poll conducted by the Dahaf Institut following the publication of the final Winograd Commission's report on the Second Lebanon War, and published in Yedioth Ahronoth Friday, revealed that in spite of Barak's former promise to that effect, 66% of Labor supporters think the party should remain in the coalition, as opposed to 31% who think it should quit.
When it comes to the pole's participants in general, the results differed, as 52% thought Barak should resign and 42% said they think he should stay in the government.
Should Barak choose to pull Labor out of the coalition, he may lose some of the public's support: Only 14% of those polled said they would like to see him as prime minister – a 3% slump from a similar poll, held just three months ago.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's position in the polls has slightly improved following the publication of the report, as 18% of those poled now want to see him stay in office, as opposed to 8% in previous polls.
Nevertheless, 56% still believe he should step down, although that too can bee seen as an improvement over the last pole, which indicated 77% wanted him to step down.
The prime ministers' conduct during the war was still conceived as "poor" by 59% of those surveyed, as opposed to 40% who though his conduct was "good".
Some 30% of the survey's participants said they would prefer to see Opposition leader MK Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) as the prime minister – a slight slump from the 33% who wanted to see him in office in the previous poll.
According to the poll, the public has full confidence in the Winograd Commission's findings, as 53% of the survey's participants said the believed the panel's work was satisfactory. Twenty-nine percent didn't agree, saying they had little faith in the findings.
As for the military, 17% said they have changed their view of the IDF for the worst, 6% now hold the IDF in higher regard and the rest were unchanged.
Seventy-five percent of those polled said they believed the IDF has learnt the proper lessons from the war and 20% said it did not.
The poll was conducted among 493 respondents, which are a representative sample of the Israeli adult population. The margin of error was 4.5%.
