The 1,400 votes that the New Right failed to win in order to pass the electoral threshold in the April 2019 election prevented Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from forming his fifth government. At first, it seemed as if the Netanyahu got everything he wanted in this election. The right-wing, ultra-Orthodox bloc won a stable 65 seats (with Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party), along with the added bonus that two former advisers whom he despises, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, were kept out of the Knesset. Their New Right party did not garner the four Knesset seats needed to make it into the Israeli parliament. But it was all an illusion. While it seemed at first as if his dreams had come true, it turned out to be one big nightmare, and it led to another election campaign — this time even tougher than the last one.
As events unfolded, he brutally fired both Bennett and Shaked from their ministries and blocked Shaked from joining the Likud. Then, on July 29, he suddenly found her at the head of the United Right list, which the polls expect to win 12-13 seats. Shaked’s comeback and her emergence as the strongest woman in politics and, in particular, on the right is also Netanyahu’s failure, especially after he tried to prevent it. He had two reasons for not wanting this consolidation of parties to happen: He did not want Shaked to become too powerful a player on his own playing field, and he believed that it would be best if the parties to the right of the Likud ran in two separate lists.
