Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s surprise decision to strike an alliance with Israel’s far-right has unnerved many in Israel and abroad. The truth is more complicated but his goal stays the same: to stay in power by any means.
The looming early elections are seemingly making Israeli politicians more desperate in their quest to snatch precious extra votes. Netanyahu, however, appears to have gone ‘beyond the pale’ in his fight for political survival.
So why has the controversial long-time prime minister, who has already been mired in corruption scandals ahead of an early vote that he called for himself, taken such a drastic step?
In fact, Netanyahu’s Likud Party has not yet made an alliance with the far-right, at least not formally and not yet, the analysts believe. What he did was encourage the far-right parties to unite to clear the 3.25 percent election hurdle to get into the Israeli parliament – something they could not do on their own, for lack of support, Tatiana Karasova, the head of the Israel and Jewish Communities Department and an academic council member at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explained.
An Israeli political analyst, Avigdor Eskin, told RT that “the Israeli election system makes it important for all major parties to compete for any extra votes,” adding that the fringe parties Netanyahu turned to still “represent between two and four percent of the electorate” and the prime minister now wants to prevent these votes from going to waste. “This is just a very pragmatic step,” he said.
That does not necessarily mean that Netanyahu has decided to move further to the right side of the political spectrum. Frankly speaking, the prime minister, who is known for his vehement opposition to Iran and his increasingly harsh policies against Palestinian protesters –which the UN recently described as potentially amounting to war crimes– does not have much room for moving further to the right.
Anyway, his move appears to be a coercive ploy rather than a conscious political choice. Netanyahu, who stayed in power for more than a decade already, fears that a newly-formed centrist Blue and White alliance – a loose coalition formed by various center-right and center-left forces, united almost solely by their opposition to the long-time prime minister and led by a charismatic former armed forces chief Benny Gantz, might actually remove his Likud Party from power.
Netanyahu abhors the very idea of forming a coalition with his strong centrist opponents, who would most likely challenge the policies of his government, Tatiana Karasova pointed out. Therefore, he needs to “erode” the composition of the new legislature with some fringe parties he could use as coalition partners, who would not dare to try and review his political course centered on the idea of Israel’s ‘security’.
However, his tricky plan might eventually backfire. Recent polls project Likud winning just about 30 of Parliament’s 120 seats, AP reports. The public criticism of his decision to align with the far-right would likely increase in the coming weeks, according to Karasova. The ploy aimed at helping Netanyahu win the next elections might still hand him a defeat.