Posted on 03/06/2015 10:16:44 AM PST by SeekAndFind
It would appear from the laudatory coverage in American media that Bibi Netanyahu is a shoo-in for election as prime minister of the United States; in Israel, not so much. At least, this is the only conclusion one can draw from this week’s polls in the run-up to Israel’s Knesset elections on March 17.
Against all expectations, Netanyahu received only the slightest of bounces as a result of the speech, which was televised and covered on radio in Israel.
These are the current numbers of the average of polls for this week:
Party This Week Last Week
HaMachane haTziyoni 24 25
Likud 23 23
United Arab List 13 13
Yesh Atid 13 12
HaBayit haYehudi 12 11
Kulanu 8 8
Shas 7 7
Yahadut haTorah 6 7
Meretz 5 5
Yisrael Beytenu 5 5
Yachad 4 4
Hardly anything has changed, and “Right” and “Left” parties remain in relative parity in what is shaping up to be the most deeply divided Knesset in Israeli history.
That said, a coalition of the Left seems farther away than ever, thanks to two other major developments this week.
The first was the categorical rejection of the United Arab List to join any coalition headed by either of the two major parties, so long as Israel remains in “occupation” of the Palestinian homeland (they did not discount the possibility of supporting the Left from outside the coalition). This realistically means that if the above numbers reflect the final election totals, a Left coalition of HaMachane haTziyoni, Yesh Atid, and Meretz would have only 42 seats. Even if Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party could be induced to join, the coalition would have only 50 — and 61 seats are necessary to govern.
While there have been minority coalitions in the past, they have always resulted from defections after a majority coalition had been formed, never ab initio. Further, Kahlon’s free-market leanings make him an unlikely partner for the socialist parties.
The second event was a massive rally of Shas supporters (expected to be the single largest political rally of the current election season) in which an estimated 10,000 people gathered in an arena in Tel Aviv (with another 3,000 watching closed-circuit television hook-ups in various locations around the country). They heard Party Chairman Aryeh Der’i, who had previously been hinting at a willingness to work with either side, declare: “We are with you, Binyamin Netanyahu. We want you as prime minister, but we want you as Bibi-Begin, not Bibi-Lapid.”
This was a reference to Likud’s founder, Menachem Begin, who had enjoyed massive support from Israel’s Sephardic population, and to the outgoing, short-lived coalition with Yesh Atid, which had frozen out and ostracized the religious parties.
A coalition of the right is still just barely possible, with the above numbers. The constituent parties would have to be Likud, HaBayit haYehudi, Kulanu, Shas, Yahadut haTorah, and Yisrael Beytenu, which would yield 61 seats. Such a coalition would be very fragile, given the number of different parties involved and the tensions inherent in the militantly secular domestic program espoused by Yisrael Beytenu and the more traditional religious parties.
Though both Likud and HaMachane haTziyoni had firmly ruled out a grand coalition last week, this week Likudnik and current Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon appeared to open the door to such a collaboration. With the above numbers, the two parties together would have 47 seats. With Yesh Atid and Kulanu, a viable coalition could be formed.
However, this, too, would have its inherent instabilities, and appears unlikely for other reasons. For one thing, who would be the prime minister?
Ya’alon insisted that Likud would not accept HaMachane haTziyoni’s Yitzhak Herzog as PM, and also discounted any power-sharing arrangement under which Netanyahu would be prime minister for two years and Herzog for the other two. Such an arrangement would in any event probably cause the break-up of HaMachane haTziyoni, since such an agreement already exists between Herzog and his co-chair Tzipi Livni, who would be frozen out. Quite a few Laborites might join Livni in the opposition, so much do they detest Netanyahu, which would probably obviate the exercise.
This is going to be a very interesting election.
The only poll that counts is Election Day.
What percentage of the Israeli vote is Palestinian?
Collaborators are always on Israel’s heels.
Don’t think the speech was about the elections in Israel, in spite of what O-oh’s administration thought and pushed.
Well .. the media in America lied and lied and lied about the polls in the 2004 election .. and after it was over, there were 4,000,000 more votes for Bush than the left was planning on.
Don’t count Bibi out just yet. The public knew that what he said was true .. but it may take them a few days to assimilate the information .. because many of them may not have heard all if it before.
Besides, Obozo has his minions spewing propaganda just as they do here in the U.S. in an attempt to sway opinion.
Yep
The US voters had a death wish in 2012. Will Israel this year?
Most of this may as well be in Hebrew for me. Is Bibi favored to win?
Are you making a crude joke about the holocaust? I didn’t understand your comment.
I think that whatever government follows the election, it will be a coalition government; so you have to lump together parties to get to a plurality or majority. That usually doesn’t happen in these articles, as you have to have detailed information on each party’s stance and likelihood of coalition partnership. Just my sense of what this article can’t do.
That is true and to paraphrase Michael Savage the half that needs shovel are oven-ready Jews.
Israel has a complicated electoral system. There are no districts; everyone in the country votes for a political party, and each political party gets a percentage of the seats in parliament equal to its percentage of the vote. The result is that no party ever wins anything close to a majority, and every government in Israel's history has been a coalition.
The current polling shows the moderate left (Zionist Union [the article uses its Hebrew name, "HaMachane HaTziyoni"] will get more votes than the moderate right party [Netanyahu's Likud]. But the problem is that there aren't enough other parties that would give ZU a parliamentary majority, even if it aligns with all of the hard-left parties and all of the centrist parties.
Further complicating the picture is the Arab parties (running as a joint party this year), who will probably get 10% of the seats, and they will not join any coalition with any of the mainstream Jewish parties, even ZU.
Netanyahu's current coalition is with the centrists and the hard right, but it looks like he will have a hard time putting that same coalition together again. The deciding factor will then be the Jewish religious parties. They tend to prefer the rightist parties to the leftist ones, but have in the past been willing to deal with anyone who will give lots of government funding to their religious schools and to exempt ultra-Orthodox religious students from the military draft. That last demand is very unpopular with the left, but also very unpopular with some segments of the right who see such widespread exemptions as a national security issue.
Netanyahu's current coalition doesn't include the religious parties, but if Likud loses seats to ZU, he may have to form a coalition with the religious parties to get a majority-- except that will in turn endanger his ability to include some of the centrist parties in his coalition. Alternatively, he might have to form a grand national unity coalition with ZU and the centrists, excluding the hard right, hard left and religious parties. But neither Netanyahu nor ZU really wants that.
Bibi will win by a slim number and have to get a splinter party to join with to rule. The polls showing him behind are iffy as political polls in Israel have been unreliable in the past. Israelis are not likely want to face a nuclear armed Iran with BiBi’s opponent in charge.
It doesn’t matter. He will go down in history for telling the TRUTH for a change.
It doesn’t matter. He will go down in history for telling the TRUTH for a change.
He will have to get many splinter parties in his coalition to rule (see my post #16 in this thread). The current polls show Likud at between 22-24 seats; even if he does much better than that, he needs 61 for a majority.
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