L an succeeds — not be enough
Itzik Shmuli, enticing them with ministries. Meretz and a lone Labour MK – now the leader, Merav Michaeli – stayed out, but the distrust caused them to run separately this round.
Disjointing the Joint List was the final masterstroke. Mr Netanyahu engaged with Mansour Abbas, the leader of conservative-Islamist party Ra’am, who was always going to be the weakest link in the Joint List’s four parties, and made it clear that there was business to be done. Ra’am split.
Mission accomplished. The three centre-left lists became six, four of them hovering around the electoral threshold. If they had failed to cross it, the Netanyahu bloc’s chances of winning an overall majority would have expanded significantly.
After he splintered the opposition, it was time to ensure the same wouldn’t happen on his side by engineering the merger of Bezalel Smotrich’s National Union with the neo-Kahanist Jewish Power and homophobic Noam parties. In this election, not even the tiniest right wing splinter would waste votes.
With the two stages of his groundwork completed, Mr Netanyahu went on the campaign trail. Here he had just one word — vaccines. With the Covid-19 lockdown still in place, the campaign took place in vaccination centres, with the prime minister acting as vaccinatorin-chief without any overt Likud message. Once public venues were opened under the “green passport” on March 7, Likud rallies began, still focused on Mr Netanyahu’s success in securing early and large shipments of vaccines for Israel. Back in December, he predicted confidently that as the vaccines take effect and Israel reopens, it would win Likud forty seats.
Every part of Mr Netanyahu’s strategy worked as planned. The opposition split, his own camp stayed together. Millions of Israelis were gladly jabbed – and in recent weeks descended in their multitudes on restaurants and bars. And yet, as the results began coming in on Tuesday night, Mr Netanyahu still didn’t have a coalition.
Incredibly, all six centre-left parties crossed the threshold, and while Religious Zionism did so as well, ensuring that not one vote went to waste, it came at the expense of seats lost by Likud, which went down from thirtysix to just thirty. Where was the postvaccination boost?
It was a comprehensive, even brilliant masterplan. But Israeli voters have already seen it all. The centre-left managed somehow to distribute its voters to all its parties. And the same voters weren’t swayed by doses of vaccines, either. Mr Netanyahu is too much of a known quantity already. The fact that he was capable of making 30 phone-calls to the CEO of Pfizer and speeding up the vaccine deliveries didn’t impress them. They know what he’s capable of.
The bottom line of this round of voting is that the year of Covid-19, the shambolic handling of the coronavirus in 2020 and the successful vaccination drive of 2021 hasn’t changed the situation on the ground. Mr Netanyahu still doesn’t have a majority and his challengers, whether they are Benny Gantz or Yair Lapid, still haven’t made sufficient inroads in to the right wing base to form an alternative election.
Even a global pandemic can’t break Israel’s political deadlock.