by Davide Frattini of Jerusalem
According to the first polls, 30 seats will be allocated to Likud leaders, 24 of them to outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid
At 73, 15 of whom have risen to power and nearly tripled that to politics, he remains the most energetic to the end, until the polls close. Megaphone in hand, bodyguards trying to drag him from the side of the car, Benjamin Netanyahu dusts off the tactics of those five election campaigns. Without a tie, with his shirt open, he vents to warn his opponents, and the Arabs “vote en masse,” he pleads, “this time our Likud won’t make it out of the house,” sounding the alarm via Twitter (“in the party hotspots it’s nobody’s turn”), even when he’s caught posting a photo from 2015.
It’s the strategy of “gevalt” (in Yiddish it means cry for help, panic), he invented it and now other political leaders are emulating it. Because this umpteenth round in almost four years is about the highest voter turnout since the early 2000s: the three or four parties (on the left and among the Israeli Arabs, 20 percent of the population) put the 3.25 percent at risk -Do not exceed the threshold, they can decide who manages to gather the majority of 61 deputies.
The first exit polls are always a gamble, they represent the polls up to 20, with such tight challenges two hours can make all the difference and most importantly they are mostly the ones where the Arabs are concentrated in the polling stations. These are the figures of the three main news programs, based on different pollsters: 30-31 seats in Likud by Benjamin Netanyahu, 24 in There is a future by Yair Lapid, 14 in Religious Zionism, 12 in Benny Gantz, 10 and 7 in ultra-Orthodox parties allied with Netanyahu, followed by 5 to 4 for Labour, Meretz and the main Arab formations. If confirmed, Netanyahu would barely have the numbers to take back the government, having remained in opposition for 20 months after serving as prime minister for 12 consecutive years.
The alliance between the Jewish power of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – ultra-religious, homophobic – would become the third force in the Knesset: the movement, which supports the settlements against any agreement with the Palestinians, had never assembled so many MPs . If Netanyahu is given the job of trying to form a government, he must grant the two what he promised: Smotrich (who called him “a liar, son of a liar” in an audio) asks the MoD if he’s a soldier – and that’s a rarity in this country – it never was; Ben-Gvir wants to be Minister of Public Security. Above all, together they want to overthrow the judicial system, put it to the political test and pass a law that retrospectively prohibits the indictment of an incumbent prime minister in order to get Bibi, as everyone calls him, out of the corruption process.
You owe it to him: it was he who, two years ago, pushed for an understanding between the extremist factions, perhaps without realizing that he was creating future contenders for his role as the undisputed monarch of the Conservatives. “He just wanted to build a zombie to hold the voices of the fringe groups together – writes Anshel Pfeffer in Haaretz, the left-wing newspaper -. He didn’t want to give his blessing to so many Likud voters to move even further to the right. His ridiculous claim that not to be photographed with Ben-Gvir is not fulfilled, the message issued is: Itamar is Bibi squared”. Lapid proves that he is no longer the famous journalist-turned-politician. He was interim prime minister for a few months, signed the maritime border agreement with Lebanon, led operations with the generals in the West Bank to disband the new militias Labor, the party that founded the country and had 44 seats in 1992, has two seats fewer, falling to 5: the Israeli left as a whole does not seem more able to attract new followers.
November 1, 2022 (change November 1, 2022 | 21:54)
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