New Right will also target Blue and White voters in Tel Aviv and the Sharon coastal district.
By JEREMY SHARONNew Right leader Naftali Bennet pictured in a political campaign ad(photo credit: Courtesy)
The New Right Party launched its election campaign on Monday – without featuring party leader Ayelet Shaked at all – and declared that it would be running independently in the upcoming poll.In the last campaign, Shaked delayed joining the New Right until close to the final date for submitting party electoral lists, with persistent rumors that she was seeking to join the Likud after the New Right’s failure to cross the electoral threshold in the April election.Shaked is again missing from the start of the New Right’s campaign, which announced the main themes and targets of its election battle without mentioning her, and with a campaign flyer that featured only party co-founder Naftali Bennett.The New Right said that its slogan would be “Definitely right – not kind of, and not sometimes,” which is apparently meant to be a jibe at Yisrael Beytenu and Blue and White, but interestingly admits that Blue and White has definite right-wing inclinations.The campaign will target Russian-speaking voters to try and peel them away from Yisrael Beytenu, which the New Right will claim has betrayed the Right and call on its voters to return to “the definite Right.”The New Right will also target Blue and White voters in Tel Aviv and the Sharon coastal district.Bennett is currently in the process of drawing up the party’s electoral list of candidates for the Knesset, its campaign team and it central messages for the election, and will establish activist headquarters in the coming days.“Rule of the right-wing will not happen without a big New Right, which will end the pretense of other parties,” The party said in a statement announcing the launch of its campaign.“Right-wing is not just in the realm of diplomacy – we are right-wing economically, right-wing in terms of freedom of the individual, right-wing which is not dependent on committees. The New Right is definitely right, not kind of right and not sometimes right.”A spokesman for Shaked did not immediately respond to a request for comment as to why she was not featured in the campaign launch.Separately, several prominent deputy-mayors and municipal council members from Bayit Yehudi called for the party to initiate primaries for its entire electoral list, something that would threaten the position of party leader Rabbi Rafi Peretz.“Bayit Yehudi and political religious-Zionism cannot allow an absence of democracy if we desire [political] life,” said the activists.There is serious dissatisfaction within the party at Peretz’s leadership and lack of electoral appeal. That, together with the departure of the New Right from the former Yamina alliance of the September election, has meant that Bayit Yehudi and its National Union ally have fallen below the electoral threshold in numerous polls.Now that the New Right has ruled itself out from uniting again with its erstwhile allies, the two religious-Zionist parties are increasingly concerned with their electoral prospects.A union with the far-right Otzma Yehudit Party is beginning to look inevitable, given the dim chances they have of passing the electoral threshold by themselves.Senior Otzma leader Itamar Ben-Gvir has called loudly and repeatedly for a union with Bayit Yehudi and National Union.
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