At the end of May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shocked Israelis by calling for new national elections after failing to form a coalition government. The commentators launched the new vote, which is unprecedented, the name «supporter», in reference to the scheduled days and the regulations of holidays and fasting, according to Jewish tradition. The term also means a second chance of success.
Despite the failure to win a majority in the April elections, Israeli opposition parties in the center and left do not seem to want a re-election. Most legislators voted against the new elections. Paradoxically, right-wing parties, which secured 65 comfortable seats (out of a total of 120), voted to concede these gains. They clearly think they can do the best. They may be right.
For more than 10 years, voting has repeatedly shown that voters from center and left make up less than half of Israeli voters. In a poll conducted before the April elections, 41 percent of all voters said they were centrist or left-wing, while 50 percent said they were right-wing. This includes Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, who make up about 20% of the total population, and vote mostly for Arab or leftist Jewish parties, but they decline at a much lower rate than Jews. Therefore, the election results generally reflect the right-wing tendency of Israeli Jewish voters.
In short, there are not enough moderates and leftists to replace Netanyahu's ruling coalition. Even a small wave of activity between the opposition camp - the recent return of former prime minister Ehud Barak, the initial elections that brought new leaders to Labor and leftist Meretz, and the reunification of two Arab parties - means little if voters turn left and center . What will happen in the coming elections will depend primarily on right-wing voters.
But expecting what they will do is difficult. Israeli elections routinely push parties to emerge, merge, split and collapse, creating many uncertainties to expect anything reliably before the Aug. 2 deadline to finalize party lists. The best place to start instead is to set the dilemmas of voters and right-wing parties.
The right turns
The dilemma of the first right is a strategy. 59% of Jewish adults define their right-wing affiliation. The rise in demand led to an increase in supply in April, when eight different right-wing parties competed in the elections. Four of them were explicitly religious: two ultra-Orthodox parties, the Shas party, the United Torah Judaism and two parties representing non-religious religious voters, the United Right and the New Right. The latter was created by two former ministers of the Netanyahu government, Naftali Bennett and Elit Shaked, who separated from a faction within the United Right. (Netanyahu was both expelled from his interim government soon after the call for new elections).
The right-wing religious minority had three options: either Likud or Netanyahu, which was set up by former finance minister Moshe Kashlon in 2015 (Kolano also attracted center voters); and Beitenu, led by former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, A secular right-wing party based on a shrunken base of older Soviet immigrants. The eighth party, Zehut, was founded by Moshe Feiglin, who supported the "Mariguana" legislation, liberal social policies and the extremist religious nationalism plan to move the government along with the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the most disputed religious site in the region.
All these options failed to increase the size of the overall right-wing bloc in April, when it lost two seats from the previous election. And supported a clear bloc of right-wing Likud voters, which won 35 seats, more than five in 2015. Both Zihut and the new right failed to meet the minimum 3.25 percent Knesset entry, with each losing more than 100 seats. A vote, or the equivalent of seven seats. Had other right-wing parties won these seats, it would have been easy for Netanyahu to form a coalition.
Right-wing Israelis of all stripes now avoid this fragmentation, and many expect smaller parties to unite by the second of August. The only change so far is further fragmentation, as a faction of the three-party United Right list withdrew. Putting personal ambition aside for a more useful general strategy is not an advantage for the majority of politicians.
Important issues
But the elections also reflect the main issues, or at least they must. What do right-wing voters want for Israel, and how do they expect politicians to lead them?
Here, the right is far from homogenous. In the polls, the camp is almost evenly split between the hardliners and the moderate right. Moderates are more likely to be secular, and to a certain extent are more committed to liberal democratic values, such as separation of religion and state, albeit to a lesser degree than the center and the left. The moderate right and the hardliners are more inclined to security and the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the vast majority of right-wingers reject the two-state solution and support the settlements.
Lieberman dropped the coalition negotiations by insisting on a law that would have recruited the army's ultra-Orthodox, who had essentially enjoyed a blanket exemption for decades. This issue has become a symbol of the desire of many Israelis to break the grip of religious hardliners and Jewish religious institutions on public life. Lieberman relies on this issue to win his votes from secular right-wingers, beyond the diminishing essence of Russian speakers. Lieberman's problem is that few believe he has taken his position on the real ideological commitment, and instead assume some unreasonable political calculations.
Netanyahu fought fiercely. Right-wing Israelis, like all Israelis, care about the economy and the cost of living. Despite the high levels of inequality, Netanyahu's supporters, even those who are suffering from poverty, are proud of the country's strong economic indicators. In the new campaign, Likud re-merged Kolano, his right-wing challenger on economic issues. Now Netanyahu can put all his economic achievements, and unmatched reputation for foreign policy, to rally the right-wing voters again.
Impending condemnation
Netanyahu's impending conviction on charges of corruption is expected to change everything. But for right-wing voters, this point is a subject of great debate. According to the Israeli Democracy Index of 2018, rightist supporters are less concerned about corruption than all other voters. The right-wing opinion book argues unabatedly that the media and the leftist judiciary are persecuting Netanyahu and the right-wing government, because they can not win at the polls. Judiciary under fire The majority of Yemeni voters support the abolition of court authority for judicial review, for example, a move considered by the center and left to be catastrophic. However, the issue divides the camps of the right and the moderate parties, which appear to be more committed to checks and balances. A human rights survey by B'Tselem found that these parties are twice as likely to support the courts as the extremists.
With regard to the permanent issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Yemeni wing adopts a completely different discourse from the Israelis in the middle and the left (and the rest of the world). The two-state solution is not possible; annexation is their vision of resolving the conflict. A few days before the April elections, Netanyahu announced his intention to annex all the settlements - appealing to voters from extreme right-wing parties that have begun Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank for years. With deepening conflict between national religious parties - all closely linked to the settler movement - and Netanyahu's desperation of gathering the necessary votes is likely to accelerate the race for annexation.
There is no doubt that Netanyahu is more vulnerable to defeat than ever before, after his stunning failure to form a government and accusations looming. Yet the man who won. Given the recent wave of activity in the center and left, the opposition parties have so far been unable to change the political structure and reshape the voters, but the odds are not in their favor. Netanyahu, the brilliant politician, can still win another victory. But until then, his legal problems - or more surprises in political agreements - may prove otherwise.
Dalia Shindlin is a writer and political analyst
With regard to the permanent issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Yemeni wing adopts a completely different discourse from the Israelis in the middle and the left (and the rest of the world). The two-state solution is not an option; annexation is their vision of conflict resolution.
The Israeli elections routinely push the parties to emerge, merge, split and collapse, creating many uncertainties, to expect anything reliably before the August 2 deadline to finalize party lists.