In the 2013 elections, HaBayit HaYehudi chair Naftali Bennett succeeded in taking a moribund political platform and turning it into a lively and stylish right-wing party. According to recent polls, that party is slated to be the third largest in the Knesset after the elections on March 17. This is an impressive achievement for Bennett. He freed the National Religious Party from its image as a party of drab politicos and created HaBayit HaYehudi, a party that managed to attract young secular people who are not settlers. With his “good buddy” charisma and the way he dominated social networks, he was able to play down his party’s extremism and turn it into a political home for a much larger public.
It is an open secret that Bennett, who began his political career in the office of then-opposition leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (2006-2008), wanted later on to run for a seat on the Likud’s Knesset list. But Netanyahu quarreled with him and put the brakes on his rise to power. Everybody knows what happened next. Though his natural tendency was toward the Likud, and that party was his first choice, Bennett switched to the National Religious Party-HaBayit HaYehudi, took over and became a rising political star.
