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Is Netanyahu Losing Control of Likud?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be presiding over the Likud party's decline, writes Mazal Mualem.
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem April 28, 2013. REUTERS/Sebastian Scheiner/Pool (JERUSALEM - Tags: POLITICS) - RTXZ2HB
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Three months have passed since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his third term as prime minister, and this week [May 1] he discovered a simple fact: He doesn't control his own party. It only took a few dozen Likud caucus members to make him face the truth. They succeeded, and fairly easily, in preventing him from appointing the man he wanted, his associate Yossi Shelly, as the director-general of the Likud movement.

Netanyahu's embarrassment and capitulation were barely reported in the news media, which misguidedly dealt with this event as an internal partisan dispute of little importance. Instead, it covered extensively the sexual harassment affair of journalist Emmanuel Rosen and the zigzagging of Finance Minister Yair Lapid on the way to having the state budget approved.

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