Bennett may get higher post
As part of the deal that made Ayelet Shaked leader of the New Right, she agreed to let former leader Naftali Bennett have the higher portfolio between them if they join a coalition, sources familiar with the agreement told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
Bennett will also lead the New Right’s negotiating team in talks with Bayit Yehudi and the National Union on a united list of right-wing parties.
The Likud would neither confirm nor deny a Channel 12 report that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing Bayit Yehudi leader Rafi Peretz to reach an agreement with Otzma Yehudit before negotiating with the New Right.
Meretz MK Tamar Zandberg said that if the report is true, it would prove that Netanyahu cares only about himself and not the future of the country. She threatened to return to the Supreme Court to try to disqualify Otzma Yehudit from running, because its leaders are followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who himself was disqualified.
Bayit Yehudi and the National Union leadership are totally opposed to the New Right’s demand of receiving half the slots in any unity agreement. Party insiders have said that they even suspect Bennett of making impossible demands so as to blow up any chance of a joint run with the two religious Zionist parties.
Bayit Yehudi and National Union remain open to the possibility of Shaked leading a joint list. Should this happen, New Right could reduce their demands on the total number of slots they receive on the united list.
Bennett has said on several occasions that he does not see Bayit Yehudi and National Union as a good option to run with on one slate, because the two parties are far more religiously conservative than the New Right and would chase away its non-religious voters.
Sources in New Right have previously argued that even though the party failed to cross the electoral threshold in the April election, it was still the single largest party to the right of the Likud, having taken 139,000 votes by itself compared with the 159,000 garnered by Bayit Yehudi, National Union and Otzma Yehudit running together.