This election is about Bibi, not ideology
AT MIDNIGHT on Thursday, the second Israeli election campaign of 2019 entered its final stretch as parties filed their final candidates’ lists before the country votes on September 17. According to the current polls, nine parties will cross the electoral threshold and sit in the next
Knesset. Two-thirds of them are the results of recent mergers.
The crucial question of this campaign will be whether Benjamin Netanyahu, who failed two months ago to build a majority coalition, can manage it this time around. That is looking increasingly unlikely as Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, who refused last time to join the coalition when there was no agreement that the new government would pass the yeshiva students military service law without change, has upped his demands from Mr Netanyahu. He is now threatening to support challenger
Benny Gantz, leader of centrist Blue and White, as the next prime minister if Mr Netanyahu doesn’t agree to forming a “wide coalition” with Blue and White and without the ultraOrthodox parties. To make things worse for Mr Netanyahu, Yisrael Beiteinu, which won only five seats in the previous election, is currently polling at double that number. This week brought further troubling developments for the prime minister. The New Right, which narrowly missed crossing the threshold in April, re-merged with the Union of Right-Wing Parties (the parties ran together in the past as Jewish Home) and will be running under the leadership of the popular former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked as United Right.
Not only does Mr Netanyahu see Ms Shaked and her political partner Naftali Bennett as hostile elements within the right-wing but the two were unwilling to commit outright to endorsing Mr Netanyahu after the election. His private entreaties to the URWP leaders not to agree to Ms Shaked’s demand for the first place on the list were rejected. “Most of us still want Netanyahu as prime minister,” said one right-wing MK. “But there’s now a substantial group headed by Lieberman, Shaked and Bennett who can’t wait for Bibi to leave. The fact that he failed to stop the merger is a sign of his weakening position.”
Mergers are in vogue in the opposition as well. In the April election it was Blue and White which combined three parties on its candidate slate. In September, every other centre and left wing party will be a combo as well. Two weeks ago it was Labour, whose new leader Amir Peretz signed a deal to run together with Gesher, the “social agenda” party lead by former Yisrael Beiteinu MK Orly Levy-Abekasis. Last week Meretz joined forces with Ehud Barak’s Democratic Israel and Labour’s young star Stav Shaffir to form The Democratic Union. And on Sunday, after months of wrangling, Arab nationalist Balad finally agreed to rejoin the Joint List, recreating the alliance of four Arab-Israeli parties which ran together in 2015.
Despite the consolidations, there are still concerns, both on the right and in the opposition, over large numbers of votes being lost by parties failing to cross the threshold of 3.25 percent of the total vote. As the JC went to press, Labour leader Peretz was still resisting pressure to join the Democratic Union, despite Labour’s weak polling. He insists that together with his new partner Ms Levy-Abekasis he is now positioned to peel “soft-right” voters away from Likud.
Meanwhile on the right, last-minute efforts were still ongoing to include candidates of the farright Kahanist Jewish
Power (which ran in April with URWP) in the United Right list. Here again, Mr Netanyahu has been very active behind the scenes pushing for a merger.
Mr Netanyahu’s motives are twofold. He wants to prevent the “loss” of tens of thousands of votes to the right in a no-hope run by Jewish Power on its own. He also believes that the inclusion of the extreme right in the rival list will push some of its voters towards his own Likud.
Another alternative for Jewish Power is to run on a joint list with the new anti-LGBT party Noam, which was formed at the behest of influential religious-nationalist Rabbi Tzvi Tau, who has become one of the most strident critics of what he sees as a growing permissiveness in Israeli society. However, even if they run together they are unlikely to cross the threshold.
If the polls are to be relied on, the number of parties in the next Knesset will be the lowest in Israeli history. Currently only nine parties are expected to cross the threshold (eight if Labour, which is hovering perilously low, dips even further). The outgoing Knesset had eleven parties and the average Knesset since Israel gained independence has had twelve. The shrinking number of parties is a result of the gradual rising of the electoral threshold but in this specific election also a sign that parties on all sides of the political spectrum are not interested in ideological differences, only in the fate of
Benjamin
Netanyahu’s rule.
Mergers are in vogue in the opposition as well’