It seems surprising that Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's poll numbers remain static. Since mid-June, when he became the first person in twelve years to displace Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's head of government, Bennett certainly has led capably. Analysts reasonably may differ as to whether Bennett's leadership has been charismatic, historic, or just plain workmanlike, but any fair assessment is that he has proven at least adequate to lead the country.
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Hamas has not gotten notably more restless since the last conflagration in May. Nothing dramatic has unfolded with Hezbollah in the north. The Abraham Accords are on track. By all appearances, Bennett's meetings in America with President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken proceeded elegantly, despite – or perhaps because of – the unplanned confluence of timing with Biden's disastrous Afghanistan evacuation. So far, any new American consulate in Jerusalem has been forestalled while the House has passed HR 5323, voting 420-9 on September 23 to allocate one billion dollars replenishing Israel's Iron Dome missile battery system. More recently, on the other side of the international aisle, Bennett's meetings with Russian leader Vladimir Putin went exceptionally smoothly.
Israel's COVID numbers have stabilized, and Bennett has handled the pandemic effectively. The quilt-work, even mish-mosh, Knesset coalition of leftists (Meretz, Labor), rightists (Yamina, New Hope), center-left moderates (Yesh Atid, Blue and White), center-right Russians (Yisrael Beytenu), and even Arabs (Ra'am) has managed somehow to hold steady through its first nearly five months of quibbling and infighting, moderated by the respective parties' common focus on keeping Netanyahu out of power.
Against such a backdrop, one would have expected poll numbers for Yamina and Naftali Bennett to have risen by now if only a bit. He entered as a mystery: Could a yarmulka'd high-tech middling political presence with seven Knesset seats truly govern as prime minister? However, he now has established a level of competence and capability that should have increased his poll numbers at least some measure, even if not to profound heights. Yet, three recent national polls all have confirmed that Yamina remains stuck in a rut all its own.
In a recent poll for Channel 13 News, if elections were held now, Yamina would get six seats, one fewer than it has held since the March 23 election. Three weeks Channel 12 News found that Yamina precisely would maintain its seven seats. By contrast, Direct Polls just found that Yamina actually drops from the 6.21% it garnered on March 23 to 2.9 percent now, imperiling its very presence in the Knesset, where a 3.25%electoral threshold must be attained.
So why have Bennett's and Yamina's numbers remained stagnant? To understand this stasis, one must look back to why so many of Yamina's 273,836 voters cast their ballots as they did.
At least half of Bennett's voters, if not more, never believed he would coalesce with Nitzan Horowitz of Meretz, Merav Michaeli of Labour, and Mansour Abbas of Ra'am in a coalition built on sharing a prime ministership with Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid. Rather, they believed Bennett was firmly committed to a right-wing, religious coalition that would stick with Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism, and Religious Zionist Party. They voted for him not to bring a moderate voice to the political right or center but to intensify right-wing pressure on Netanyahu and the Likud to adhere to campaign promises that concern the right. Remember: the very name of the party, "Yamina," means "To the Right."
That was – and remains – Bennett's primary appeal to his portion of the Israeli electorate: not as premiership material but as a gadfly to keep Netanyahu and Likud honest to their Jabotinsky-aligned campaign rhetoric and promises.
When Bennett jumped ship in June after proving unable to help cobble together 61 seats behind Netanyahu, he maintained that he was honoring a core promise he had made to his voters: no fifth election. And that was true. He had promised that, and he fulfilled that. But he also had promised that Yamina would act as the key no-compromise bolster to a right-wing government that would be unable this time to backtrack on core promises to that constituency. He failed to honor that iron-clad pledge. If politics is the art of the possible, his sketch work may have appealed to half his voters, but he has left the other half feeling not merely disappointed but deeply cheated, their votes stolen.
No matter that Bennett may govern competently and even may have won to his camp two or three new seats' worth of votes. In doing so, he permanently has lost the faith of at least as many who had trusted and relied upon him to guarantee a no-compromise right-wing government. That perfidy to those voters will not be forgotten.
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