In January 2013 – not that long ago, but still long enough to be before the last elections – I wrote a short article headlined 'Bibi Forever' for the New York Times. Not everything I said in that article proved to be totally accurate. A week later, when the election results became known, I had some explaining to do. But in the grand scheme of things, I was right: “Israelis”, I wrote just days before Election Day, “will go to the polls Tuesday knowing that nothing short of a miracle will prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from securing his third term in office. He is already thinking about a fourth term”.
The post-election explaining had less to do with Prime Minister Netanyahu and his performance on Election Day and more to do with his future coalition partners – especially the surging Yesh Atid Party, which was the “surprise” of the election with 19 seats. Here is what I wrote after the election: “I didn’t foresee how strong a message Israeli voters would send to Netanyahu. And the message went: Yes, we’d like you to remain as prime minister, but we want you to form a more moderate coalition”. My article for the Jewish Journal that week got the headline: “Voters to Netanyahu: Get New Friends”.
Two years later, at the end of January 2015 – that is, about a week ago – I was interviewed by Moment Magazine and painted a different picture for this election round:
Two years ago it was almost impossible for anyone to usurp Netanyahu and become prime minister. So the whole point of the election last cycle was to determine the kind of coalition Netanyahu was going to establish. This time it is not about the nature of the next Netanyahu coalition. It is about the question of whether it will be a Netanyahu coalition, or a coalition led by the Labor Party.
It is a nice little theory, and last week it still seemed accurate – but this week it does not. Of course, Election Day is still far away, six weeks or so, and a lot can still happen until then. But maybe it’d be wise for me to explain now, rather than a few days after Election Day, what changed in the last couple of days that makes my analysis from two weeks ago outdated, and why, with all the obvious caveats, we are again in a “Bibi Forever” election cycle.
In fact, Domain readers should not be surprised to hear that a Netanyahu coalition is the likely outcome of this election. Two weeks ago we painted the highly complicated math of the ‘anything but Netanyahu’ coalition. For the Labor party and candidate Yitzhak Herzog – Netanyahu’s main rival – “the options are not many, and the difficulties are great. Haredis and Lapid do not mix well. Haredis and Meretz do not mix well. Lieberman and Meretz or Arabs do not mix at all. Lapid and Arabs do not mix well. Koolanu might have already decided that their aim is a Netanyahu government. All this tells us that a Herzog coalition is going to be a messy and an unstable one”.
Still, two weeks ago it was still more reasonable to see a window for Herzog. Today it is less reasonable.
Why?
First of all, because of the number of projected seats of Likud and Labor. Two weeks ago, Labor was climbing up and Likud seemed in slow decline. At some point, Labor had 3-4 more seats in the polls than Likud. This is no longer true. In recent polls Likud gets an equal number or, more often, a higher number of seats than Labor. That is to say: when President Rivlin will need to give someone the mandate to form a coalition, Herzog will not have the advantage of having more seats under his command then Netanyahu.
Moreover: Likud is getting stronger within the right-wing camp – at the expense of Habayit Hayehudi, which is getting weaker – and Netanyahu’s room for political maneuver is getting wider. Eli Yishai's ultra-right-wing party (Yachad) is suddenly in the game – that is, above entry threshold. Avigdor Lieberman is weak and not quite threatening to Netanyahu. Koolanu is doing OK, but not much more than that. These are all natural partners of the next Likud-headed coalition, and they all have few options other than joining a Netanyahu coalition on his terms.
Moreover: in recent days, a number of statements seem to have sealed the deal. Shas’ Aryeh Deri said that he sees no path for a Herzog coalition – signaling to his voters that he is going with Netanyahu. Lieberman stated that he will not “sit with the left” in a coalition, making a Herzog path even less possible. A senior member of United Torah Judaism – that is, the Ashkenazi Haredi party – said that he will not sit with Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid in a coalition. There is no Herzog coalition without both Lapid and the Haredi parties, and that is why Lapid, who knows this quite well, has refused time and again to rule out the possibility of sitting with Haredi parties in a coalition.
All in all, the picture for now is not rosy for the anything-but-Bibi camp. The Labor Party climbed up for a short while and then reached what seems to be its limit – around 25 seats. Meretz, to Labor’s left, is in danger of elimination if more voters abandon it to vote for Herzog. The numbers for a coalition just don’t add up. That is, unless something dramatic happens until Election Day, or on Election Day, or if we discover, after Election Day, that everybody is not telling the truth and that a great desire to end the Netanyahu era can bring together some very unlikely bedfellows.
So here we are again, thinking not “is it Netanyahu?” but rather “what kind of Netanyahu?” – namely, what coalition Netanyahu is about to form. Ask Israelis, and many of them would urge him to form a unity government with Labor. But Tzipi Livni, Herzog’s partner, just said that she is not going to sit in a Netanyahu government, and Netanyahu just said that he is not going to form a coalition with Herzog and Livni. Of course, these are all politicians running for office, and they should not be believed. Still, they might be telling the truth, and in such case even the question of what type of coalition we are going to see becomes boring. Likud, Habayit Hayehudi, Shas, UTJ, Yachad, Koolanu, Israel Beiteinu. Put together that is 69 seats. And I must admit: it's not really an exciting coalition.
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