Consummate campaigner
NETANYAHU FIGHTING FOR POLITICAL LIFE IN MONDAY’S VOTE
After a year of uncertainty and two deadlocked votes, many Israelis say they have disengaged from the political process, exhausted by months of politicking and irritated by the prospect of a third election on Monday. But not Benjamin Netanyahu.
A veteran campaigner, Israel’s four-time premier is pulling out all the stops to ensure his political survival. In the past week alone, he has promised to legalize marijuana, build vast settlements in the occupied West Bank that would destroy any hope of a contiguous Palestinian state and suggested that an intimate video of his main rival, Benny Gantz, might have been obtained by Iranian hackers.
“There is no sense of the end of times for Netanyahu — he is fighting like someone who is still hungry,” said
Tamar Hermann, the director of the Guttmann Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research.
“Wearing my academic’s hat, I can tell you this: he is the best politician Israel has seen for a long time now.”
Netanyahu, 70, certainly has the most to lose. An outright defeat would mean political exile and leave him unprotected when his trial on corruption charges begins on March 17. A deadlock — like the past two elections when no party was able to form a governing coalition — would at least leave him with the continued security of the position of caretaker prime minister, which he has held for nearly a year. A victory would give him a historic fifth prime ministership.
His rivals, the Blue and White alliance, made up of centrist and centre-right voters, have mostly stuck to televised events and radio broadcasts. Their leader, the taciturn Gantz, whose patrician bearing and military background has in the eyes of many made him a viable alternative to Netanyahu, has yet to headline any major rallies.
In contrast, Netanyahu has greeted shoppers at supermarkets, stayed on top of the nation’s response to coronavirus and threatened to invade the Gaza Strip. An enthusiastic political operator who has dominated Israeli politics since the early 1990s, he has banned journalists from most events and spends the long drives to campaign events cajoling recalcitrant voters on the phone.
“He’s always been a political animal, and he has always fought tooth and nail for every possible vote,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion expert who has worked on eight prior Israeli election campaigns. “But he seems more motivated now — with a real fire in his belly, perhaps because of his legal situation.”
A recent set of polls suggest his zeal for the political process may be helping to turn the tide. They showed his 47-year-old Likud party pulling ahead of the Blue and White by one or two seats. While that would not be enough to deliver a governing coalition for Netanyahu, it has changed the mood of the campaigns, according to party members. In the Blue and White campaign an air of despondency has taken hold in the daily meetings, four aides told the Financial Times, while Likud insiders report a sudden sense of enthusiasm.
That may just be more political theatre, said Scheindlin, pointing out that Netanyahu has always been a master of what Israelis call the “Oy Gevalt” moment, where Netanyahu switches between cocky confidence on the night before the polls to sudden alarm on voting day to make sure he can push turnout from his right-wing base.
In previous elections last April and September, Netanyahu went to Israel’s beaches and cafés with a loudspeaker urging citizens to cast their vote, while warning that Arab Israelis, who make up some 20 per cent of the country, were voting in large numbers.
This time in what has largely become a referendum on Netanyahu, the prime minister has promised to annex vast swaths of the occupied West Bank and boasted of his ties with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. That has allowed him to frame the election as a test of his ability to deliver on long-held right-wing promises, and head off Gantz’s attempts to cast him as a corrupt politician distracted by legal trouble.
Netanyahu’s trial, which begins in just over two weeks, is expected to complicate the marathon coalition negotiations that are likely to follow the poll. Gantz, infuriated by personal attacks directed against him by Likud insiders, has ruled out the possibility of a unity government.
That leaves Israel poised between the unlikely outcome of an election day surprise that delivers an outright winner, or the more probable prospect of a fourth election that would be fought while Netanyahu and his lawyers spend their days in Jerusalem District Court trying to prove his innocence.
To some that prospect might appear daunting. But Netanyahu’s “mood is exuberant — bring another election, it’s fine,” said one Likud central committee member after speaking with Netanyahu. “At least he lives to fight for another day.”