Israeli election: Netanyahu favourite as polling stations open

Voters begin marking their ballots as Netanyahu hopes for 'a flood of votes' for his right-wing bloc Israelis trickled into polling stations on Tuesday to vote in elections expected to return Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power at the head of a government of hardline right-wing and religious parties .
A handful of voters were already queuing up as stations opened at 0500 hrs GMT, waiting to mark their ballots in blue voting booths.
Netanyahu was out early, casting his ballot with his wife Sara and their two sons at a polling station in the upscale Rehavia neighbourhood of Jerusalem, where the Prime Minister's official residence is located.
The Prime Minister, after casting his ballot said he hoped for "a flood of votes" for his right-wing joint Likud-Beitenu bloc, Israeli media reported.
Polling ahead of the vote has consistently projected an easy win for the joint list of Netanyahu's Likud faction and the secular nationalist Yisrael Beitenu of former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
The Prime Minister is expected to preside over a sharply right-wing government that is considered less likely to achieve a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians and could increase Israel's diplomatic isolation.
The government will face key diplomatic and foreign policy questions, including Iran's nuclear programme and a Middle East profoundly changed by the Arab uprisings.
But domestic challenges will be no less pressing, with a major budget crisis and austerity cuts on the horizon, even as Israelis express widespread discontent over spiralling prices.
The joint Likud-Beitenu list may be confident of leading those competing for the Knesset's 120 seats, but polls show that the two parties will lose around 10 of the seats they hold now, garnering around 32 seats in total.
The centre-left Labour [Kadima] party is projected to trail in second place with around 17 seats. Its chief, Shelly Yachimovich, is expected to become leader of the opposition after pledging she would not join a Netanyahu government.
The campaign's big surprise has been Naftali Bennett, the young, charismatic new leader of the hardline national religious Jewish Home. He took over the party in November and has quickly become a rising star among settlers.
The party, which firmly opposes even the existence of a Palestinian state and won just three seats in 2009, is on course to win 15, making it the third faction in parliament and a likely partner in any future coalition government.
Bennett's success has rattled Netanyahu, pundits say, with the premier pushing to stem the defection of voters to Jewish Home by burnishing his own credentials as a defender of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories.
Overall, according to final polls, the rightwing-religious bloc will take between 61 and 67 seats, compared with 53 to 57 for the centre-left and Arab parties.
Some 5.65 million Israelis are eligible to vote in Tuesday's parliamentary elections, including Arab citizens of the Jewish state, who are expected to stay away from the polls in record numbers.
Security has been tightened across the country and more than 20,000 police officers have been deployed to secure the vote.
Meanwhile, less than half of Israel's Arabs, who represent a fifth of the population, are expected to vote in Tuesday's election, in what pundits say could be their lowest-ever turnout.
Despite calls from all sides for them to get out and vote, many feel disenfranchised in reality, and are increasingly fed up with being excluded from political decision-making, which has for four years been dominated by right-wing nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties.
In Nazareth, the city with the largest Arab population in the country, the election campaign has been largely discreet.
"The Arab parties don't represent us well," says Samih Taha, a 23-year-old student who voted in the last legislative election for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, a Jewish-Arab socialist alliance better known as Hadash.
"I don't believe in elections. Even if [the Arab parties] get 18 seats in the Knesset, what can they do or influence? What can we do to change Israeli decisions?" he asked.
Those involved in piecing together Israel's multiple coalition governments have systematically excluded the Arab factions from executive power, often accusing them of having an anti-Zionist agenda.
In a first, the Arab League joined those calls on Monday, urging "Arab citizens of Israel to turn out in droves for the elections so they are represented [in parliament] and can oppose racist laws."

Source: AFP