Netanyahu's Move to Right Leaves Opening for Olmert at Center
Netanyahu may lead the largest party following Likud's merger with Yisrael Beitenu, but not necessarily the most popular. Alon Pinkas writes that Ehud Olmert could lead a centrist bloc that poses a real challenge to the new alliance.
This was supposed to be a Seinfeld election in Israel: no real agenda, no real visions, no big narratives except for "Iran" and all those urgent issues that the political system conveniently defers to the next generation.
But these elections are in fact historic for one reason: the first time ever not dealing with Israel's relations with the Arab world, or with the future of our cohabitation with the Palestinians. "Peace" is a T-shirt, and Palestinians exist is a parallel universe.
Now, with the audacious and strange merger between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud Party and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beitenu Party, these elections seem to have metamorphosed into something completely different. They just may redefine the blurry political divide.
With the Netanyahu-Liberman merger, the Israeli center-right moved appreciably further to the right.
