Party director-general: Just streamlining after elections
By GIL HOFFMANPrime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu removing his mask(photo credit: ELI DASSA)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud has been hit hard financially after five consecutive elections and is facing significant debts to banks and suppliers, current and former party officials revealed exclusively to The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.The party faced massive expenditures from running in municipal races nationwide, followed by internal primaries and then three general elections. The officials said the debts would make it very hard for the Likud to face another general election, which would be initiated automatically if a state budget is not passed by August 25.“The situation is awful,” one party official said, while a former party official in contact with current employees said the Likud was “approaching bankruptcy.”The current and former party officials revealed that Likud employees were being fired while others were desperately looking for work. One party official said selling party branches was inevitable.The Likud owns 15 buildings nationwide that host the largest of its 190 branches. Most of the branches were almost always empty before the coronavirus pandemic and with few exceptions, they are empty buildings now.The largest is the Likud’s historic Tel Aviv headquarters, Metzudat Ze’ev, a 14-story building in central Tel Aviv, located a block away from the Dizengoff Center mall on land that is seen as prime real estate. The dilapidated building hosts a museum about party mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky.“Netanyahu wishes he could close all the branches, and if we were a dictatorship, he really would,” one party official said.Natan Engelsman, a member of the Likud’s governing secretariat that oversees that party’s finances, said secretariat members have not been briefed about the financial situation, as they would have been in the past.“There is no transparency nowadays or the institutions there once were before we became a party of only the leader,” Engelsman said. “The world has changed, and we don’t need branches or the Metzuda. No one comes to the Metzuda anymore, and there is nowhere to park. Events take place elsewhere. If there are debts, they should sell these empty buildings, but every party has its own internal interests.”Likud Director-General Tzuri Sisso responded that “there is a normal process of streamlining after two consecutive years of primaries, municipal and general elections.” He said that “workers are being let go [so] that we need less at this time.”Asked about party branches, he said none would be sold, and in fact, renovations were taking place and the Likud may even open more.A Likud spokesman said only four or five workers would be fired who are not needed when there is no upcoming election.“There is no impending catastrophe or bankruptcy, but there are pressures,” the Likud spokesman said. “There is nothing dramatic financially, just holes that have to be filled after the elections.”Yesh Atid MK Mickey Levy responded that “Netanyahu is in a battle for his political survival” due to his corruption cases, and therefore it as unlikely that debts in his party would influence his decisions about whether to initiate another general election.
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