Jonathan Ferziger
By Jonathan Ferziger
Having served longer than anyone since Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, Netanyahu is struggling to reach beyond the party faithful to younger voters drawn to fresher faces, analysts say. With Likud in a neck-and-neck race with opponents in the polls, the man Time magazine hailed two years ago as King Bibi is putting his survival skills to the test in the March 17 contest.
“There’s clearly a level of Bibi fatigue,” Hebrew University political scientist Gadi Wolfsfeld said. “Times have changed, the economy has changed, but he’s using the same lines we heard from him 20 years ago.”
While housing and food prices are weighing on Israelis in this election, Netanyahu continues to emphasize the security issues that have been the foundation of past campaigns. The dangers posed by Iran and Islamist radicals are a more frequent theme than reviving an economy growing at its slowest pace since 2009.
With peacemaking at an impasse, Netanyahu is losing ground to Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, 42, a former aide and technology entrepreneur whose Jewish Home party opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Polls show it winning as many as 17 of parliament’s 120 seats, up from 12.
“Bibi definitely has a problem because young right-wing voters who would have voted Likud in the past are looking at the new guys,” pollster Rafi Smith says. “Bennett knows how to talk to them and he’s pulling away a lot of support.”
Ehud Perry, a 33-year-old executive and longtime Netanyahu supporter, said he and his friends are looking seriously at rivals. While sharing the prime minister’s caution about Arab- Israeli peace prospects, he sees a trail of broken promises most evident in the government’s failure to contain housing prices, which have soared 90 percent since 2007 while the average annual wage, now $28,000, has risen 21 percent.
“With young people, he’s in free fall,” said Perry, chief executive of Machshavot Smartjob Ltd., a legal recruiting company in metropolitan Tel Aviv. “He’s talked for years about helping the middle class, and people don’t believe him anymore.”
Israeli voters have dethroned Netanyahu before. Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, defeated the incumbent Netanyahu in 1999. After taking a timeout to earn money on the lecture circuit and as a business consultant, Netanyahu returned as Ariel Sharon’s finance minister and later as opposition leader, rebuilding Likud and returning to the prime minister’s office in 2009. Don’t count Netanyahu out, though. No single party has ever governed Israel without partners, and surveys show Netanyahu is probably best placed to form a new government with other factions who share his skepticism about peacemaking with the Palestinians.
“The preponderance of evidence is that even if another party gets more votes than Likud, Netanyahu’s the only one who can put together enough parties for an effective coalition,” said pollster Camil Fuchs, a Tel Aviv University statistician. In 2009, Likud won fewer seats than the Kadima party, and it fared worse than polls forecast in 2013. Even so, Netanyahu became prime minister both times by bringing more lawmakers into his coalition camp.
This time around, polls consistently give Likud about 22 seats. That’s one or two less than the alliance formed by Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, 54, and Tzipi Livni, 56, the justice minister and chief peace negotiator Netanyahu fired before calling early elections on Dec. 2. The government fell less than midway through its four-year term, after the prime minister clashed with Livni and Yair Lapid, the finance minister he also fired, over issues including the 2015 budget and peacemaking.
Likud spokeswoman Noga Katz declined to comment on Netanyahu’s standing, saying he must first win Likud’s Dec. 31 leadership race to become the party’s nominee. Areas ripe for attack include the prime minister’s failure to significantly bring down the cost of living, after a summer of protests in 2011 brought more than 400,000 people into the streets. While home prices in downtown Tel Aviv rival Manhattan, almost a fifth of Israel’s 8 million people live in poverty, the third-worst rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after Mexico and Chile.
Economic growth probably slowed to 2.3 percent in 2014 from 3.2 percent last year, the Bank of Israel said in September. In the 2013 race, the pocketbook protests helped Lapid’s newcomer Yesh Atid party become the No. 2 faction in parliament as the champion of the middle class. Current polls show Yesh Atid losing about half of its 19 seats; the new Kulanu party of former Likud Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon, 54, founded around cost-of-living issues, would win seven to 10.
Opponents say Netanyahu is an anachronism whose world view is mired in war and conflict. Last week, Lapid, 51, said Netanyahu’s drumbeat about security threats suggested he was mentally still fighting the wars of 1948 and 1967. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, “what decade are you stuck in?”
While Lapid, a former TV talk show host, paints him as out of touch, Netanyahu once held audiences rapt when he was the country’s 35-year-old ambassador to the United Nations. He climbed government rungs over the following decade until becoming Israel’s youngest prime minister in 1996.
For party faithful, he still has that magic touch.
“He has charm and charisma like nobody else, like a magnet,” said Tali Argaman, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv’s Givatayim suburb, as she waited for Netanyahu at the Likud rally.
“Maybe someone will come along eventually, but in the meantime there isn’t anybody better in the party,” she said.
WP-BLOOMBERG
By Jonathan Ferziger
Having served longer than anyone since Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, Netanyahu is struggling to reach beyond the party faithful to younger voters drawn to fresher faces, analysts say. With Likud in a neck-and-neck race with opponents in the polls, the man Time magazine hailed two years ago as King Bibi is putting his survival skills to the test in the March 17 contest.
“There’s clearly a level of Bibi fatigue,” Hebrew University political scientist Gadi Wolfsfeld said. “Times have changed, the economy has changed, but he’s using the same lines we heard from him 20 years ago.”
While housing and food prices are weighing on Israelis in this election, Netanyahu continues to emphasize the security issues that have been the foundation of past campaigns. The dangers posed by Iran and Islamist radicals are a more frequent theme than reviving an economy growing at its slowest pace since 2009.
With peacemaking at an impasse, Netanyahu is losing ground to Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, 42, a former aide and technology entrepreneur whose Jewish Home party opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Polls show it winning as many as 17 of parliament’s 120 seats, up from 12.
“Bibi definitely has a problem because young right-wing voters who would have voted Likud in the past are looking at the new guys,” pollster Rafi Smith says. “Bennett knows how to talk to them and he’s pulling away a lot of support.”
Ehud Perry, a 33-year-old executive and longtime Netanyahu supporter, said he and his friends are looking seriously at rivals. While sharing the prime minister’s caution about Arab- Israeli peace prospects, he sees a trail of broken promises most evident in the government’s failure to contain housing prices, which have soared 90 percent since 2007 while the average annual wage, now $28,000, has risen 21 percent.
“With young people, he’s in free fall,” said Perry, chief executive of Machshavot Smartjob Ltd., a legal recruiting company in metropolitan Tel Aviv. “He’s talked for years about helping the middle class, and people don’t believe him anymore.”
Israeli voters have dethroned Netanyahu before. Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, defeated the incumbent Netanyahu in 1999. After taking a timeout to earn money on the lecture circuit and as a business consultant, Netanyahu returned as Ariel Sharon’s finance minister and later as opposition leader, rebuilding Likud and returning to the prime minister’s office in 2009. Don’t count Netanyahu out, though. No single party has ever governed Israel without partners, and surveys show Netanyahu is probably best placed to form a new government with other factions who share his skepticism about peacemaking with the Palestinians.
“The preponderance of evidence is that even if another party gets more votes than Likud, Netanyahu’s the only one who can put together enough parties for an effective coalition,” said pollster Camil Fuchs, a Tel Aviv University statistician. In 2009, Likud won fewer seats than the Kadima party, and it fared worse than polls forecast in 2013. Even so, Netanyahu became prime minister both times by bringing more lawmakers into his coalition camp.
This time around, polls consistently give Likud about 22 seats. That’s one or two less than the alliance formed by Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, 54, and Tzipi Livni, 56, the justice minister and chief peace negotiator Netanyahu fired before calling early elections on Dec. 2. The government fell less than midway through its four-year term, after the prime minister clashed with Livni and Yair Lapid, the finance minister he also fired, over issues including the 2015 budget and peacemaking.
Likud spokeswoman Noga Katz declined to comment on Netanyahu’s standing, saying he must first win Likud’s Dec. 31 leadership race to become the party’s nominee. Areas ripe for attack include the prime minister’s failure to significantly bring down the cost of living, after a summer of protests in 2011 brought more than 400,000 people into the streets. While home prices in downtown Tel Aviv rival Manhattan, almost a fifth of Israel’s 8 million people live in poverty, the third-worst rate in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, after Mexico and Chile.
Economic growth probably slowed to 2.3 percent in 2014 from 3.2 percent last year, the Bank of Israel said in September. In the 2013 race, the pocketbook protests helped Lapid’s newcomer Yesh Atid party become the No. 2 faction in parliament as the champion of the middle class. Current polls show Yesh Atid losing about half of its 19 seats; the new Kulanu party of former Likud Communications Minister Moshe Kahlon, 54, founded around cost-of-living issues, would win seven to 10.
Opponents say Netanyahu is an anachronism whose world view is mired in war and conflict. Last week, Lapid, 51, said Netanyahu’s drumbeat about security threats suggested he was mentally still fighting the wars of 1948 and 1967. “Mr. Prime Minister,” he said, “what decade are you stuck in?”
While Lapid, a former TV talk show host, paints him as out of touch, Netanyahu once held audiences rapt when he was the country’s 35-year-old ambassador to the United Nations. He climbed government rungs over the following decade until becoming Israel’s youngest prime minister in 1996.
For party faithful, he still has that magic touch.
“He has charm and charisma like nobody else, like a magnet,” said Tali Argaman, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv’s Givatayim suburb, as she waited for Netanyahu at the Likud rally.
“Maybe someone will come along eventually, but in the meantime there isn’t anybody better in the party,” she said.
WP-BLOOMBERG
