by Mati Tuchfeld
One can blame Netanyahu for bringing down the government and failing to honor agreements, but it is Benny Gantz who is responsible for getting us in this position in the first place. His lack of control over Blue and White was the main reason this government, and his party, have fallen apart at the seams.
No matter how much he may have tried, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not have broken up the unity government and avoided honoring the rotation deal with Blue and White head Benny Gantz had members of the defense minister's party actually behaved as if they were members of the coalition government. No amount of tricks or loopholes in the coalition agreement would have made any difference. Nor did Netanyahu have any exit ramps for calling an early election in mind when he entered talks to form the coalition government. After all, he was the one who demanded a two-year state budget be written into the deal.
The many years Netanyahu has spent in the prime minister's seat have proven that despite all the rivalry and paranoia, he knows how to be pragmatic, even when it comes to his haters. He has formed governments with Tzipi Livni of the now-defunct Zionist Union, Yamina's Naftali Bennett, and after three particularly ugly election campaigns, Gantz.
The party dynamic exposed over the last 24 hours during which Gantz lost total control of Blue and White as three of its members refused his explicit request to abstain from the vote on postponing the deadline to pass the 2020 state budget has accompanied Blue and White ever since its formation and led to its slow but certain disintegration.
The first sign of this dynamic came just one week after the government was formed when Social Equality Minister Meirav Cohen said she had no faith in the prime minister. That is a statement that cannot be made by a sitting minister in Netanyahu's government who has collective responsibility for its decisions. This is a statement that in any other situation would have resulted in Cohen's immediate firing. But this was no ordinary situation, and Netanyahu did not have that authority. Gantz was the one who should have called her to order and explained a minister could not speak in this manner, but he never did.
Gantz, a gentle and optimistic man by nature, didn't once dare to call his party members who continuously sneered, mocked, and attacked the man at the government's head to order. On more than one occasion, he was even dragged into joining their attacks and voicing automatic opposition to Netanyahu's moves. Although they were all members of the prime minister's government, it was as if Blue and White was still in the middle of its anti-Netanyahu election campaign. One can blame the prime minister for bringing down the government and failing to honor agreements. That is all true. But it is Gantz who is responsible for getting us in this position in the first place. From the outset, he failed to control the members of his party. His lack of control over Blue and White was the main reason this government, and his party, have fallen apart.
It will not be easy for Netanyahu to manage the next election campaign. The coronavirus is still running rampant, and a third lockdown will be imposed for a few weeks. What good is talk of vaccines and peace agreements when commerce is shut down, children are stuck at home on Zoom, and everyone is at home, under pressure, depressed, and bored. Netanyahu would very much like to keep the lockdown out of his campaign and manage it against the background of final liberation from the pandemic until the great vaccination campaign comes to an end, sometime around Independence Day, which will fall on April 14. But this will happen before Passover, in late March, which is problematic. Three critical weeks could tip the scales in either direction.
Netanyahu saw how US President Donald Trump missed out on Pfizer's announcement on the efficacy of its coronavirus vaccine and did everything he could to ensure the same thing wouldn't happen to him. In the coming weeks, we'll see if he succeeded.
It is not just the pandemic that will make this election particularly challenging for Netanyahu. After three elections without a clear victor, there is no guarantee this one will result in a different outcome. For the time being, the right-wing bloc has pretty much fallen apart. And the demand for a rotation deal seems to have become something of a routine request for any partner necessary to form a coalition government.
Netanyahu needs to find himself the right opponent, and with a significant gap between the Likud party and all the rest, this won't be easy either. The challenge from the Right means Netanyahu will also contend with a campaign the likes of which he has yet to experience, with two significant parties, Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope and Yamina, attacking him from the Right, while on the Left, at least as things currently stand, there is a fairly large void and an absence of tension that will motivate voters to head to the ballot box.
Mati Tuchfeld
Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/12/23/unruly-blue-and-white-to-blame-for-election/
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