You already know that our exclusive Israel Poll Trends tracker is the best way to follow and understand Israel's crazy election season. But this week Prof. Camil Fuchs has made a special effort and is presenting us with a new trendline: the one chronicling the decline of Prime Minister Netanyahu's Likud-Beiteinu Party.
The graph is truly eye-opening, and the story behind it is somewhat of a mystery. The decline – says Prof. Fuchs – was predictable. So why then were Netanyahu and his political partner, former foreign minister (and now preparing for his trial) Avigdor Lieberman, so eager to merge the lists of their parties? Maybe they didn't anticipate that the blow would be as severe as it is, maybe they didn't care much about the number of mandates as long as their party was guaranteed to be the largest one.
What one can see in the graph that is striking is this: the merger of the Likud Party and the Yisrael Beiteinu Party was the political watershed event of the 2013 Israeli election. To understand how – you'd have to take a look at it, and read our analysis. It's just a click away.
