Netanyahu in the driver’s seat

The big surprise of the election so far is the realization that it is Netanyahu’s to lose.

By AMIEL UNGAR
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entering a meeting in Lod (photo credit: POOL/ ILAN ASSAYAG)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entering a meeting in Lod
(photo credit: POOL/ ILAN ASSAYAG)
THIS ISN’T the best timing for a piece on the Israeli elections.
We still have a way to go in the campaign and there are many wild cards.
For example, Iran. We do not know how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before the US Congress against the emerging deal between the P5+1 and Iran will play or even whether Netanyahu will actually deliver it. Nor how a deal, if reached, will impact on Netanyahu’s standing, since he has made the Iranian nuclear file his signature issue.
Secondly, while everyone is fixated on the current front runners – the Likud and the Zionist Union’s Herzog-Livni duumvirate – the election results could actually be determined by the also-rans. Israel opted for a formidable 3.25 percent electoral threshold to qualify for the Knesset and therefore could find itself in a “German situation.” In the 2013 Bundestag elections, Chancellor Angela Merkel handily defeated her SPD rivals but the collapse of her traditional FDP coalition partner forced her into another grand coalition with the SPD. With Eli Yishai’s radical right/Haredi Yahad, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu and even the dovish Meretz hovering near the cutoff point, their fortunes could have a decisive impact on the outcome.
Therefore, let us concentrate on what the campaign has already shown us. So far the main takeaway is that Netanyahu and the Likud are doing better than I expected. I felt that Netanyahu was past his sell by date and the Likud would have been better off running Gideon Saar to blunt the “anybody but Bibi” thrust of its rivals.
I was mistaken.
So far the Likud has judo-like used the attack against Netanyahu to throw its opponents. Indeed, the phrase “anybody but Bibi” appears in a Likud ad listing all those who are out to get Netanyahu, most notably the media. The accusation is largely accurate and reflects the media’s collective overweening goal to do to Netanyahu in 2015 what it did in 1999, when it clearly mobilized in favor of his opponent Ehud Barak.
This is not going to be a repeat of 1999 for several reasons. First the playing field is a bit more even. American billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s freebie and pro-Netanyahu Yisrael Hayom daily newspaper commands the largest exposure of a print journal eclipsing the Bibi-bashing Yedioth Ahronoth. Journalists have lost credibility and, according to a recent Israel Democracy Institute survey, their credibility rating dips even below that of the politicians.
More importantly, the number of potential crossover voters from the Likud-led national camp to the Zionist Union is proving to be extremely limited. Despite Herzog and Livni’s rollout portraying their alignment as a marriage between Labor and Likud aristocracy, the public isn’t buying it. The other 1999 phenomenon, where voters would first defect from Likud to center parties and after a brief stopover in the center would complete the odyssey to the left, is not happening either.
Isaac Herzog compounded the problem when he reacted petulantly to Likud and Bayit Yehudi campaign ads citing unfortunate statements by Labor party candidates. This is a stock campaign item in Israel and elsewhere, but for Herzog it was hyperbolically reminiscent of the “incitement campaign” that preceded the Rabin assassination. As the sage 19th century French diplomat Talleyrand might have put it: Not only was such a charge wrong, it was stupid.
Herzog dredged up memories of the witch hunt that followed the 1995 Rabin assassination that targeted anyone who rejected the Oslo legacy. This is hardly the way to entice switch voters.
In the interim, the centrist parties are losing their X-factor allure and are being increasingly identified with the right or the left. Hilik Bar of Labor has actually suggested that voters sick of Netanyahu can either vote for the Zionist Union or for Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid. Centrist Moshe Kahlon had abortive talks with the Likud on a joint list, while Avigdor Liberman seeing his decline in the polls now claims that he would never sit in a left-wing government.
Netanyahu could still lose the election. but, the big surprise of the election so far is the realization that it is his to lose.
Contributor Amiel Ungar is also a columnist for the Hebrew weekly Besheva