In just a few weeks, former Minister Moshe Kahlon, the chairman of the new Kulanu Party, will reveal his party's list for the Knesset. According to some polls, the party will win at least 11 seats and be part of the next coalition.
Kahlon emerged from the Haifa branch of the Likud in the 1990s. He was first elected to the Knesset in 2003, following a vote by the Likud’s Central Committee. In the two next elections, he continued to rise and was promoted by the party's apparatus on the Likud's Knesset list. In 2006, he was elected by the Likud Central Committee to the No. 1 slot on the list, and in 2009 he was chosen for the well-respected No. 5 slot. After those elections, in which the Likud returned to power, he was appointed minister of communications and social affairs. The cell phone reform project that he advanced made him the most popular politician not only in the Likud, but among the general public, and he garnered a reputation as a bold social warrior.
After his bitter clash with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in October 2012, Kahlon announced he was taking a leave of absence from politics and would run again in the next election as the head of a new party. But it's highly unlikely that the young Kahlon, the kid from the immigrant Givat Olga neighborhood who grew up in the periphery of the Likud, could have found himself a slot in the new party now being established by Kahlon, the popular party leader, for the simple reason that the entire Knesset list will be picked by a single individual, party Chairman Moshe Kahlon.
Based on comments he made to political sources in the last year, Kahlon wants Knesset members who will follow his instructions and submit to his authority. He will appoint them, and he will be the ultimate arbiter. He will select which Knesset members serve in the various committees, and he will determine the party’s path, its agenda and the conditions for it to enter the coalition. This process will contain no democratic procedure. It is a one-man political platform, and the deal he offers potential candidates is very clear: The cost of a ticket to the Knesset is total compliance to him.
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