Is Netanyahu watching a fifth election, pushing Bennett into Lapid’s arms?

There are twelve days left until Benjamin Netanyahu’s mandate from the president to form a government, and everything is really stuck.

The Knesset was frozen after Netanyahu lost a vote in plenary on Monday that denied Likud a majority in parliament’s organizing committee, prompting committee chairman Miki Zohar to refuse to convene it. .

This is a technical, procedural matter, but it has major implications for the Prime Minister. Without the organizing committee, no other committees can be set up, making parliament anything but impossible to do its job.

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For Netanyahu, the loss to the committee means he cannot change the electoral system to allow for the one-time direct prime ministerial contest he demands, which he says will ultimately govern who will be Israel’s next prime minister after four indecisive elections.

Apart from a dramatic political surprise (always a possibility as far as Netanyahu is concerned), the next twelve days are likely to pass without a functioning Knesset.

The last three days. the parliament building was wrapped in a strange silence, but for Netanyahu it did not weaken the will to keep fighting. He has launched the next phase to his battle for a decisive victory and is ready for a fifth election.

The inexplicable attack on Naftali Bennett

“Contrary to what you claim, Naftali, you are doing everything to torpedo a right-wing government,” Netanyahu told cameras on Wednesday in comments made by all major television channels.

It was a refrain repeated over the past few days by Likud officials and Netanyahu himself. Bennett was’ demolishing the right ‘, stimulating a right-wing coalition and, as Netanyahu put it, preparing’ to form a left-wing government of [Yair] Lapid, Meretz and Labor supported by the joint list … While we have the mandate, you have concluded an agreement with Lapid on a government of left and extreme left.

“You said, ‘Bring [Betzalel] Smotrich and Gideon [Sa’ar]”Netanyahu said and addressed Bennett, ‘but there is a solution that does not depend on them, a solution in which the public decides who the prime minister is, and the solution depends only on you.’

Netanyahu’s accusation is strange. Mathematically, this is not true: Netanyahu’s religious-right coalition, including Bennett’s Yamina, has only 59 seats that are all told, two less than the majority Netanyahu should form a government.

Netanyahu’s intensive efforts to bring Frame of New Hope to his side failed miserably, but no failure was Bennett’s fault. It was the leader of religious Zionism, Smotrich, who bound the Ra’am agreement and New Hope’s own Sa’ar who told Netanyahu not to bother to separate him from Lapid. Bennett, meanwhile, announced last week that he would withdraw a Netanyahu-led government at the moment one can be found. He then agrees with Likud on the bill on the organizing committee.

Bennett has expressed reservations about the direct election bill, which he says will empower the prime minister at the expense of parliament and mean a fundamental change in the rules of the game in the middle of the game. On Wednesday, he openly opposed it. But Netanyahu would not have had the votes to implement the measure, even if Bennett had supported it.

Netanyahu is right that Bennett entrenched his commitment, during the campaign refused to commit himself to a Netanyahu-led government and has at least one obvious reason to put a Lapid government above one with Likud (a turn as prime minister) to prefer. But none of that changes the painful fact that Bennett was not the cause of Netanyahu’s election problems. At every turn – at least until Wednesday – Bennett agrees with Netanyahu.

Why then is Bennett the only target of his anger? Why did Netanyahu, as a small right-wing “pinhead”, slap himself on top of a left-wing government or mockingly suggest that he consider having Bennett spend a weekend in the prime minister’s residence to talk about his “lust for power”?

The fifth election

The answer is simple: He decided to go for a fifth election.

To get there, Netanyahu must first ensure that Lapid does not succeed in forming a coalition after failing.

When Netanyahu’s term of office expires in twelve days, President Reuven Rivlin will be required by law to have several choices at his disposal, including extending Netanyahu’s term by up to another 14 days; instructing Lapid as head of the second-largest party, giving him 28 days to try to form his own coalition; or the delivery of the baton to the Knesset as a whole, causing a period of 21 days in which any MK who can win a vote by 61 MKs can become prime minister. At the end of the last period of 21 days, if no one succeeds in forming a government, the Knesset will automatically dissolve and hold new elections.

The order is essential to understanding Netanyahu’s plan and Lapid’s looming challenge: Netanyahu, then (if the president elects) Lapid, then the whole Knesset gets a chance.

It seems Netanyahu is resting on his laurels that he will not get a majority for the composition of the government or to weaken the March 23 race via a direct vote for prime minister.

Now he must prevent Lapid from succeeding in succeeding where he will almost certainly fail.

The campaign against Bennett has one goal: to deter him from forming a coalition with Lapid. This is a foretaste of Likud’s upcoming campaign against Yamina, which Bennett knows he can lower his party at the ballot box.

Netanyahu seems to believe that setting up Bennett as a ‘power-hungry’ right-wing enemy will deter the Yamina leader of a government with Lapid and left-wing parties. He seems to believe that naming the joint list of the Arab majority will harm Bennett, even after Likud’s intense courting over the Islamic party Ra’am over the past two weeks – and even after Netanyahu’s call to the Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas for support for the direct election bill just a short time before his speech on Wednesday on Bennett.

Turning point

Netanyahu’s strategy is smart. Bennett and Sa’ar (and also Smotrich) have much more reason to fear a new election than Netanyahu. Each can be deleted in the next vote of the Knesset. It is therefore logical to try to scare them with the possibility, to do your best to drag them without coalition to the abyss and see if they do not get around there. In the worst case, Likud could focus his campaign in the ensuing race on reducing the two right-wing challengers.

But there is a tipping point that Netanyahu does not see. He is so used to playing the game in his most unscrupulous and predatory way, that he cannot know when he has crossed the line on which the effect of his shameful campaign is reversed. Since tyrants and bullies often learn their distress, a slight pressure can ensure obedience, but too much pressure can cause a sudden and overwhelming setback.

Netanyahu’s anti-Bennett campaign may have passed that point.

The attacks by Netanyahu and other Likud politicians and media surrogates “do not impress me,” Bennett said Wednesday. He says, ‘If I do not have a government, no one will have a government; we will have elections – 5th and 6th and 7th…. It can not go on. Israel cannot be held hostage by politicians … While the country wants a government, Netanyahu is electing another election. I will not let that happen. ”

Instead of convincing Bennett that he would be better off than Lapid, Netanyahu convinced him that he would have to face Likud’s anger anyway, that Netanyahu would try to wipe him out in the next election, no matter which way he went. go. now.

That knowledge only makes a coalition with Lapid more attractive. Bennett would have a real chance of winning the premiership, and might get some credit for stabilizing the political system and ending the cycle of repeat elections, and based on his demands in earlier talks with Lapid about a ‘national unity government’, can keep the line with leftist policies successful.

This is definitely a gamble. But all political coalitions are a gamble, as Netanyahu’s own experience with some unstable coalitions over the past decade shows. If the fire trial is to take place anyway, he might as well sit in the driver’s seat.