A New Party Threatens Netanyahu’s Hold on Power |
Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party, is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, having held his post, on and off, for 18 years now. First elected in 1996, he went down to defeat in 1999, only to regain his job in 2009 after serving as foreign and finance minister. Swept out of office in June 2021, he reclaimed the premiership in December 2022, following the fifth election in less than four years.
With the next election four or five months away, Netanyahu is looking forward to extending his electoral streak and political longevity. But with the formation of the Yachad (Together) Party on April 26, Netanyahu’s chances of regaining power are by no means assured.
Yachad was formed by two former prime ministers, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, who shared Netanyahu’s premiership while he was briefly opposition leader. Lapid headed the middle-of-the-road Yesh Atid Party, which currently holds 24 Knesset seats. Bennett, a rightist, led the Bennett 26 Party. Previously, he was at the helm of the Jewish Home Party and the New Right Party.
“Bennett and I don’t pretend to agree on everything,” Laipd said the other day. “He’s a right-winger, I’m a centrist. We have disagreements, and that’s good. For too long we’ve let our differences define us. This time, we decided to start with what unites us. Before all our disagreements, we are patriots, we are Zionists, we believe in a Jewish and democratic state, and we believe in each other.”
In this unifying spirit, the pair think they can oust Netanyahu, but there are no guarantees in Israeli elections.
As Netanyahu’s former advisor, Mitchell Barak, has pointed out, Bennett has a history of starting out strong and petering out, while Netanyahu is often initially weak but comes up on top. Case in point: Tzipi Livni, a centrist, won more seats than Netanyahu in the 2009 election, but was unable to form a coalition, giving him the opportunity to cobble together a government.
At the moment, Netanyahu and his coalition partners have 64 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, eight more than their opponents. The Likud has 32 seats, more than any other party.
According to a recent Channel 12 News poll, Yachad would be two seats shy of a majority after the next election. A Zman Yisrael survey found that Yachad and Likud would emerge as the largest........