Tzipi Livni, former leader of Israel's opposition party Kadima, may come back to politics in the near future amid calls for her to establish and lead a new opposition party.

Livni left her seat in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) on Tuesday, but on the very same day, members of the party began urging her to form a new party and run in the upcoming elections.

In March, Livni lost the internal leadership elections to Shaul Mofaz in a hard-fought race, thus ending a three year power struggle between the two.

While the current Knesset is not due to end until 2013, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to announce the general elections to be held either on Aug. 24 or Sept. 4.

"There is a lot of pressure within Kadima because they have now 28 members in the parliament, and according to opinion polls they will only secure about 12 in Israel's 120-seat unicameral legislature," according to professor Gideon Rahat of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

"They fear that they will lose their position, so some of them think that they should try and run with Livni," Rahat told Xinhua.

Under Israeli statutes, seven MPs can quit their party to form a new one, which is eligible to receive public financing to run in elections.

If Livni chooses to heed the calls and form a new party, it would most likely follow a centrist path and add ferocity to the already fierce battle over the voter segment.

In addition to Kadima, Livni's new party would also have to compete for votes with the Labor party which is starting to re- establish itself after Defense Minister Ehud Barak split to form his own party in 2011.

There is also the newly-established Future party under ex- journalist Yair Lapid, who will be reaching out to the same type of voters as Livni.

Itzak Galnoor, professor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that he is not sure if Livni will actually run, but he warned the center path in Israel's politics is very tricky.

"From past experience, the center is more of a wishful place and not a real political reality," Galnoor said.

"All the parties that have tried to occupy this place for many years, but they lasted one or two terms and that is it," he added.

One such example was the Shinui party founded by Yair Lapid's late father, Tommy. While the party enjoyed great success in the 2003 elections with 15 mandates, only a couple of years later it fell apart.

Rahat argued that the establishment of a new party in the center or to the left does not necessarily mean that a more fragmented opposition would be a weaker opposition.

"There will be a lot of centrist parties. And in the Israeli system, when you have a lot of parties, it isn't bad because people might find that they like one of the three parties," Rahat said "so they might together actually grab some votes from the right."

However, they all have to pass a two percent electoral threshold, below which all of a party's votes are discarded.

So, if there will be three centrist parties and all of them pass the threshold, they might have more seats together than one unified centrist party, according to Rahat.

Galnoor predicted that while most of the focus at the moment is on the party leader's personality, as election day approaches, ideological issues will become more dominant. The two main issues, he argued would be how Israel should deal with Iran's presumed development of nuclear weapons, and socioeconomic issues.

"The question is, if all these opposition forces can take a few percentages from the current coalition, and then there will be a change in Israeli politics," Rahat added.