As the election campaign began last week in Israel, the political ranks and the electorate were unanimous regarding at least one thing: no one seemed to want to go to the polls.
The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fired two of his top coalition partners from cabinet, claiming the pair plotted against him, making it impossible to govern. Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni responded by painting Netanyahu as the power-hungry, sole instigator of his coalition’s demise. And Israeli voters signalled their own frustration over being called upon to elect a new government two years ahead of schedule. According to early polls, voter participation is expected to decline for the March 17, 2015, election, compared to the previous vote in 2013.
But for an election campaign nobody apparently wanted in the first place, the political pace has been breathtaking – and there’s still three months to go. The collapse of Netanyahu’s coalition has elicited a multitude of new potential alliances, on the right, left and even among the Arab parties. Not to mention the genesis of a new party led by ex-Likud minister Moshe Kahlon. Before his upstart organization even had a name, it had become a major player in Israeli politics.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu and his Likud party have also been trending upward – polls indicate Likud can expect more Knesset seats in the next election, and even if a majority of Israeli voters don’t want Netanyahu to continue on as prime minister, they have even less trust in all of his potential successors. That’s far from a ringing endorsement, and it could render Netanyahu vulnerable to a leadership challenge, but until the vacuum is filled he remains the default option at the top.
It took just days from the first election announcement for the political tone to change from antipathy to opportunity. But it remains to be seen whether voters will embrace the campaign in the same way. In the meantime, in this week’s CJN author and Shalom Hartman Institute senior fellow Yossi Klein Halevi offers his view of what the Israeli electorate wants.
“The reality as most Israelis today know it is a combination of left-wing and right-wing insights,” he writes. “The left was correct about the dangers of occupying another people. The right was correct about the impossibility of reaching an agreement with the Palestinian national movement that denies our legitimacy in any borders. So most of us in Israel today, and I very much include myself in this, are neither left nor right, but a mixture of both. We’re centrists.” (For more of our Q&A with Yossi Klein Halevi, see pg. 14.)
The outgoing coalition fits that description – between them, the parties involved covered a dizzying array of social, economic, and security issues, on the right and the left. More than likely the next one will, too, no matter if Netanyahu presides over it or someone else assumes the mantle. The question remains whether the result will be different enough to justify the nearly two billion shekels ($572 million) the election is estimated to cost Israelis. Every election brings new winners and losers, but if the electorate isn’t among the former, then something’s not right.— YONI