Netanyahu, Liberman in fierce battle over right-wing votes
The Blue and White party, which posed a real threat to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the last election, is now the least of his headaches.
Knesset member Avigdor Liberman announced the night of June 15 that he would force a national unity government on the Likud and the Blue and White party, and that he plans to advise the president to give the task of forming the new government to whichever party is the largest. This turned September’s upcoming election into a head-to-head battle between him and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
This is already a very strange election, unlike anything we’ve seen before. Until now, elections always pitted the leaders of the two major parties against each other, with one from the right and the other from the center-left. That’s not the case this time. The prime minister, who heads a party (Likud) with 35 seats, now sees his main rival as being the head of a small party on the right with just five seats (Yisrael Beitenu). Oddly enough, the Blue and White party and its leader, Benny Gantz, do not pose a serious threat, at least as far as Netanyahu is concerned. Maybe it’s because the Blue and White party also needs Liberman if they are to form the next government.
As of now, Netanyahu’s biggest rival is someone on the right rather than someone from the center-left. On one hand, he needs to block Liberman, so he is aiming all his firepower at him. On the other hand, he also has to unite the other right-wing parties around him and come up with a way to ensure that they don’t lose any seats. That’s because Netanyahu knows better than anyone that if he fails to reach the finish line with 61 safe seats from parties on the right and the ultra-Orthodox (a majority coalition), he will get caught in a dizzying tailspin that could cause him to lose his job as prime minister.
According to a source close to the prime minister, Netanyahu believes that Liberman plotted to topple Netanyahu by refusing to join his coalition. The prime minister believes that if he had not dissolved the Knesset, another Knesset member would have received the task of forming a coalition. In such a scenario, that Knesset member would have succeeded in composing a government, while Netanyahu fails. “Liberman didn’t believe that Netanyahu would manage to dissolve the Knesset," he said on condition of anonymity. "That is why there is no more trust [between them]. As far as Netanyahu is concerned, Liberman is a clear danger who would do anything to harm him.”
