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.
On Jan. 14, HaBayit HaYehudi selected its list for the 20th Knesset in open primaries. Bennett wanted to freshen the list as part of a larger master plan to turn HaBayit HaYehudi into the governing party to replace the Likud, but instead was left with the same slew of candidates, with a few minor adjustments.
This list is a generally sectarian and extreme right one. Its No. 2 is Housing Minister Uri Ariel (of Tekuma, jointly running on the same list), who used his term to focus mainly on the expansion of construction in the settlements and to sell to religious associations public housing units intended for impoverished families. The top 10 candidates on the list include Knesset members Nissan Slomiansky, the chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee, during whose tenure budget funding was transferred to the settlements, as well as Col. (Res.) Mordhay Yogev and Eli Ben-Dahan, who both served in the previous Knesset. Extremist Orit Strock is in the party’s No. 14 slot.
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