Well, kids, it looks like your Bibi-Sitter’s big trip to Washington didn’t really go as planned. Not only did his speech, contrary to its stated purpose, manage to make it less likely that Congress will take action to halt the Iran nuclear talks, but it looks like it didn’t even give Bibi the electoral boost he was undoubtedly hoping for back home. The most recent polls are actually showing Likud losing ground in next week’s election to the center-left Labor/Hatnuah coalition, the Zionist Union. If the polls are right, and the election were held today, Likud would win about four fewer seats than the Zionist Union, and that’s obviously not where Likud wanted to be this close to the actual vote. Likud has been in panic mode over the possibility of a defeat for a few days now.
Interestingly, before the voting even starts, it seems that some anonymous Likudniks have decided to skip “denial” on the Kübler-Ross model and go straight to “anger,” specifically at Bibi himself. They’re calling his whole campaign a “colossal failure,” and they may have a point. Bill Clinton’s 1992 slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid,” is trite and overly simplistic, but it’s not wrong. People vote based on what affects them directly, and more often than not that means the state of the economy. Netanyahu has run a campaign oriented around security — security against Hamas, security against Iran and Hezbollah, security against Bashar al-Assad, security against the whole world, really — but meanwhile it seems that what really has Israelis concerned is a rising cost of living that threatens to leave many of them in the proverbial dust. The hypothetical of an Iranian nuclear weapon or the possibility of another barrage of Hamas rockets hitting empty desert can’t trump everyday worries about making ends meet, and Netanyahu doesn’t seem to have realized this. His self-projected image as the only leader strong enough to protect Israel from the many threats it faces aren’t helping him with people who are worried about being able to afford rent or a mortgage as housing costs go through the roof.
The funny thing about the all this inter-Likud griping is that it’s still at best 50/50 that the Zionist Union will actually get to form the next government. Israeli politics are very difficult to predict, and there’s a tendency for some party to outperform expectations on election day, but it’s not clear if that will happen this time or which party that would be. Then comes the sticky business of trying to put together a coalition of parties that can get to 61 Knesset seats and thereby win the right to form the government. Even if the current polls hold and ZU beats Likud by ~4 seats, Israeli politics are so tilted to the right that it may still be easier for Likud to put together a majority coalition than for ZU (though a four seat margin of victory for ZU could be enough to give it a path to a majority).
Handicapping the coalition-forming process is complicated by the fact that Israel’s electoral system has a minimum vote threshold (which in practical terms amounts to winning four seats in the Knesset), and any party that fails to meet that threshold gets nothing. So a party like left-wing Meretz, which the ZU would need to join its coalition if it’s going to get to 61 seats, may underperform slightly on election day (right now it’s polling around 6 seats) and fall below the minimum threshold, which would affect both the overall election results and ZU’s ability to govern. On the other hand, the far right party Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Foreign Minister and Possible Lunatic Avigdor Lieberman, looks increasingly like it will not hit the minimum threshold (interestingly not because Lieberman is a lunatic, but because he also appears to be a crook), which could seriously impact Likud’s ability to get to 61 seats. There are a couple of centrist parties, like Yesh Atid and Kulanu, that may wait to see which way the overall winds are blowing and then join the coalition that looks likeliest to hit 61 seats, but if either of those parties is the one that overperforms its poll numbers then they could really throw their weight around in the coalition-building phase.
The other wild-card here is the Arab Joint List, which represents the first time that Israel’s Arab parties have managed to unite behind one slate of candidates. It was formed last year when the Knesset decided to raise that minimum vote threshold in hopes that the small, disunited Arab parties would fail to win seats at all. This was done at Lieberman’s coaxing, ironically, since it’s now his party that looks like it will fail to meet the new threshold. The parties in the Joint List currently hold 11 seats and seem likely to add a couple more after these elections, which would make them potentially a significant player in forming a coalition if they had any interest in participating or if they weren’t so potentially toxic to the major parties. The Arab parties reject direct participation in the government because they argue that participating in the government would mean endorsing (or at least going along with) state policies that immiserate the Palestinians. On the flip side of that, there are real concerns that centrist parties would refuse to join a coalition that included Arab parties (for example, Yesh Atid’s leader, Yair Lapid, has said this about his own party outright). If the ZU were to add the Joint List to its potential coalition but lose Yesh Atid in the process, that wouldn’t put it any closer to being able to form a government.
One possibility that seems increasingly more credible is that Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will ask the ZU and Likud to form a national unity government. Netanyahu has reportedly been flatly refusing to consider such an action, but the difference between what you say in a campaign and what you do once the votes are counted is sometimes pretty vast, you know? And anyway, Likud could decide to bench Netanyahu for his failure in this campaign, and the next Likud leader might be more open to a unity deal. A unity government would probably be set up to last only a short time, with the position of Prime Minister rotating between the co-heads of the ZU, Labor’s Isaac Herzog and Hatnuah’s Tzipi Livni, and Netanyahu, and with a mission to try to alter the electoral system somehow (maybe to increase that minimum threshold again to flush more of the smaller parties out of the system) in advance of what would hopefully be a more definitive election in a year or so.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 