As the election campaign heads into its final week, the two largest parties – Likud and Blue and White – are appearing to focus on a familiar campaign strategy to drain support from smaller parties on the Left and Right to boost their own total number of seats.
"Blue and White has decided to focus on taking votes away from the Labor party and other parties in the center-left camp," former Knesset Deputy Speaker and Labor Party secretary Hilik Bar told JNS.
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Within the past two months, Blue and White, which counts three former generals among its top four positions, tried to woo right-wing voters based on their security credentials. Bar explained that this has largely failed and that the party's leaders realized that they cannot bring voters over from the Right.
Instead, he said their focus now is to try to become the larger party by appealing to center-left voters in the hope that this will lead President Reuven Rivlin to task their leader, Benny Gantz, to form the government.
"Blue and White will fail in their attempt to drain votes from Labor," said Bar.
Bar went as far as calling on those traditional Labor supporters who voted for Blue and White in the April election to return to their political home. He argued that "Blue and White is just a temporary party, which will disappear just like Kadima and others. But the Labor party, which founded the State of Israel, will always exist."
Bar said the Labor Party will likely go on the offensive against Blue and White, pointing out to voters that they are a party without an ideology, and that they are better off staying with Labor.
Blue and White has similarly shifted its strategy to targeting secular voters.
This past week, Gantz, who had been reaching out to the ultra-Orthodox population, including through visits to their communities and not speaking out against them, announced that the government he formed would be "a secular government." It was a clear message he prefers not to include the ultra-Orthodox parties in a coalition he would form. This change of direction reflects an attempt to become the largest party by drawing votes away from Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu party, which according to the polls, is predicted to double its number of Knesset seats thanks to his attacks on the ultra-Orthodox parties.
Gantz was immediately subjected to sharp attacks from ultra-Orthodox leadership for the move.
When asked for comment about Gantz's plan to form a "secular government," Shas Knesset member Yakov Margi, who also serves as chairman of the Knesset education committee, told JNS, "such a government will not be established." The ultra-Orthodox political leadership believes that Gantz has no path to a Knesset majority without the ultra-Orthodox parties, and therefore, the promise of a "secular government" is simply a ploy to try to win more votes.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party has similarly focused their attention on trying to be the largest party by taking votes away from Yamina, the party to their Right led by former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked. To counter this, Shaked and others in her party have gone on the offensive, telling voters that if they don't vote for Yamina, which has been predicted to win very few Knesset seats, Netanyahu will turn to the Left to form a government.
Likud may also need to contend with the far-right Otzma Yehudit party. According to one recent poll, Otzma Yehudit is predicted to pass the 3.25% electoral threshold, earning four seats in the next Knesset. Until recently, Likud had been pressuring the party to drop out of the race, but if the party were to somehow pass the electoral threshold, it could be an important boost for Netanyahu, giving him the 61 seats needed for a governing coalition. It could also, however, prove problematic due to their more hard-line views.
While Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben-Gvir told JNS, "There is a very good chance that we will cross the threshold," he said that his party would not automatically join a Netanyahu government.
Aside from his demand to be made a minister before joining a coalition, Ben-Gvir said, "Netanyahu would have to accept important components of the party platform, including capital punishment for terrorists, harsher conditions for terrorists in Israeli prisons, and a stronger response to Hamas rocket and balloon/kite fire from Gaza."
As the campaign enters its final week, and the parties shift direction and change their messaging in a final push to win more votes, one thing remains certain: No one knows how this election will end and what kind of government will emerge.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
