For the fourth time in two years, Israel is on its feet, with exasperated voters preparing for a race that will form another polarizing referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s oldest leader and its only prime minister to face criminal charges.
Experts are already classifying the March election as a “Just Bibi vs. Just Not Bibi ”, in a reference to the nickname of Netanyahu. Like President Trump, whom he enthusiastically supports, Netanyahu inspires fierce devotion among his followers and near hatred among his detractors.
But whether another voter trip to the polls in March will bring greater stability to the country or if a frustrating reiteration of its political stalemate has yet to be seen.
“Nobody is promising that there will be no fifth elections,” warned political analyst Afif Abu Much.
Netanyahu, known as “the magician” for his apparent ability to take improbable victories out of his hat, is entering the campaign facing obstacles that will challenge even his formidable political survival skills.
Israel’s economy was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic, with the country entering its third national blockade under Netanyahu’s supervision on Sunday amid a new outbreak of infections. His unprecedented trial on corruption charges, which began in May, is expected to enter a more sensational phase in February.
And now he is facing competition from a former ally, Gideon Saar, who resigned from Netanyahu’s Likud party earlier this month to form a new political party, New Hope, which aims to divert conservative voters tired of political melodrama. around Netanyahu. Another rival, Naftali Bennett, a former defense minister who leads the right-wing Yamina party, also gained strength.
Netanyahu’s fifth term lasted just seven months, with the new election automatically triggered by law after the government did not present a budget for 2020 until midnight on Tuesday. Lawmakers rejected Netanyahu’s call to extend the budget by one week, leading to the collapse of the coalition government.
“This time, for the first time, Netanyahu did not declare elections,” said Abu Much, who writes political comments for Yediot Ahronot, a popular tabloid, and for the website Al-Monitor. “He was dragged against his will for this election.”
But in an instant survey, nearly half of Israelis blame Netanyahu for forcing them to support another election once again, with about 18% of respondents holding Netanyahu’s centrist coalition partner responsible for Benny Gantz.
The two men’s alliance in the government was strange and turbulent, struck after an election in March gave neither a viable parliamentary majority without the other. This election was Israel’s third in a year.
At the moment, voters appear willing to punish Netanyahu and Gantz, although much remains to be changed by election day, March 23.
The right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu currently holds 32 of the 120 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. If the polls carried out after the government’s collapse continue, the party will gain less than 30 in March.
The outlook is even worse for Gantz, a political neophyte who campaigned throughout 2019 and 2020 as the clean government’s anti-Netanyahu champion before launching in April to join forces with the man he was trying to overthrow. Gantz now appears to be heading towards near political oblivion, with polls showing that his Blue and White party has plummeted to about five seats in the Knesset.
In his usual style, Netanyahu is projecting confidence. He attributed the failure of the governing coalition to Gantz’s dependence on “a dictatorship of left-wing bureaucrats” and, with a touch of Trump, predicted, “We will win big!”
Many Israelis believe that Netanyahu’s primary objective is to assemble a parliamentary supermajority that he hopes will freeze, or even overturn, the ongoing criminal proceedings against him – a prospect considered impossible by most legal experts.
Netanyahu failed in his attempt to gain parliamentary immunity from the prosecution in January, weeks after Atty. General Avichai Mandelblit indicted him on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. The opening of his trial in May was a media spectacle, with Netanyahu declaring himself on the court steps as the victim of an attempted coup by high-ranking court officials and “the left-wing media”.
The trial’s trial phase – with several former Netanyahu associates expected to testify against him – is scheduled to begin in February, while the election campaign is in full swing.
“Leaving aside all the political noise, the reason we are going to an election is that Netanyahu refused to pass a budget as required by law and to honor political agreements. [that] he can remain in power for the duration of the trial, ”said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Institute of Democracy, a non-partisan study group. “Israel’s current political crisis will continue as long as Netanyahu remains prime minister and a government cannot be formed without him.”
Despite all the problems that plague him, 39% of Israelis named Netanyahu as the best choice for prime minister in a survey conducted by a local TV network last week.
But in a sign of trouble for the prime minister, almost the same proportion – 36% – chose Saar, a separatist politician from Likud, a former minister of interior and education. Three other coalition members resigned to join Saar, including Zeev Elkin, a former Netanyahu protégé, who accused his former mentor of “holding Israel hostage” to his legal problems.
In addition, Netanyahu is about to lose another great ally: Trump. With President Duckling leaving the White House on January 20, Netanyahu will no longer be able to tout a close relationship with Trump as a selling point.
Trump regularly gave political gifts to Netanyahu that were programmed to give him a campaign boost, never more dramatically than in March 2019, when Washington recognized Israeli sovereignty over the long-disputed Golan Heights days before a general election. In other victories for Netanyahu, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal with Iran, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and helped facilitate normalization of ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco .
What kind of relationship Netanyahu will establish with President-elect Joe Biden has yet to be seen.
The Israeli leader reminded Biden in a tweet that the two have “had a long and warm personal relationship for almost 40 years”, but Netanyahu has avoided calling Biden “president-elect” for weeks and continues to feature a picture of him with Trump on his Profile. Twitter.
Political analyst Tal Schneider does not expect Netanyahu to stop talking about his ties to Trump, even after he leaves the White House.
“He will for sure continue to use his connection to Trump as a campaign argument,” she said, “and will say that it was his personal connections around the world that secured the normalization agreements.”
For now, Israelis are concerned with issues closer to home, while recovering from the economic repercussions of a series of coronavirus blockages with no end in sight. Netanyahu hopes that a mass vaccination campaign – he was the first Israeli to be vaccinated, live on television – will help tame the pandemic.
Netanyahu and Gantz will now serve as interim co-ministers until the March election. If the vote produces another stalemate, the coalition dispute could mean that the unfortunate duo continues to rule Israel for more months.
“We can be stuck in the same place,” said Abu Much.
“Paralysis” is as Plesner describes it – and it is a situation that is likely to persist, he said, until Israeli voters, and not their disputed politicians, make a final choice.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.