As election fight gets digital, Bibi still holds the ace card
EIGHT WEEKS to the elections in Israel and, while recent polls show Labour — or in its current incarnation with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah, “The Zionist Camp” — with a small but constant lead of between one and four Knesset seats over Likud, Isaac Herzog still faces a rocky path to forming the next government.
The left-wing Zionist parties, Labour and Meretz, are currently polling together at around 30 seats, while the right-wing bloc of Likud and Habayit Hayehudi are closer to 40.
On Sunday, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reinforced Mr Herzog’s problems when he said: “I would sit in a Herzog government, but not together with [Meretz Leader] Zehava Galon.”
In order to form a majority coalition, the Labour leader would need the support not just of Meretz but of nearly all the centrist and Charedi parties. If he could not get Meretz and Yisrael Beiteinu together, he would have to carry off another impossible balancing act, convincing both strictly Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, to sit around the same cabinet table with ultra-secular Yesh Atid.
On current polls, Prime Minister Ben- jamin Netanyahu emerges as the leader of the second-largest party in the Knesset, but he seems to have much better prospects when it comes to building a majority.
On Monday, both Meretz and Yisrael Beiteinu completed their selection process and presented their candidates list, the last two major parties to do so.
While Meretz’s list is nearly identical to its current team, with the exception of the departure of MK Nitzan Horovitz, Mr Lieberman has radically pruned his roster. Eight of Yisrael Beiteinu’s 13 serving MKs will not be returning — some have resigned, while others were pushed down the list to unrealistic positions given the party’s dismal standing in the polls.
Mr Lieberman’s new list is a lot “less Russian”, younger and “social-affairsorientated”, with MK Orly Levi-Abekasis — a popular campaigner for children’s rights — promoted to second place, and a newcomer to national politics, Safed Mayor Ilan Shochat, in fourth spot.
Mr Lieberman is trying to attract voters from the centre with his two-state plan under the slogan “Ariel to Israel, Umm el Fahm to Palestine”. This plan would leave most settlements in Israel and some large Israeli-Arab towns in a future Palestinian state.