Facing ‘leftist’ alliance, Netanyahu probes idea of uniting the right

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that he was looking into the possibility of forming a bloc of right-wing parties to run together in the upcoming elections, proposing a counterweight for the center-left alliance being bruited about to challenge the premier for the top spot.

Asked during a press conference in Brazil if he was considering a similar alliance on the right, Netanyahu said he was “checking all options,” in order to prevent some of the smaller parties failing to pass the electoral threshold and threatening the political right’s current Knesset majority.

“I will act responsibly so that the right-wing bloc will preserve its power,” he said, promising to form a coalition after the elections “based on the current government.”

Yisrael Beytenu, which united with the Likud on a joint list in the 2013 elections, immediately rejected the idea of teaming up this time, releasing a statement slamming the idea, while Netanyahu was still speaking.

“We have no intention whatsoever of uniting with any party. We will work independently and are confident that at the end of the election campaign we will bring a double digit number of mandates,” said the party headed by Avigdor Liberman, who resigned as defense minister last month claiming that the government’s response to Gaza violence was too soft.

No center-left alliance has emerged yet, but polls show a party combining Zionist Union or Yesh Atid with former IDF chief Benny Gantz could challenge Netanyahu’s dominance of the polls, and Zionist Union No. 2 Tzipi Livni has publicly appealed for various parties to join forces, in a bid to oust Likud from power.

Even without a united left, Netanyahu and his allies are said to be very concerned that no fewer than seven right-wing parties are mounting Knesset bids, splintering the bloc’s power and running the risk of leaving some factions below the electoral threshold needed to enter the Knesset.

The latest right-wing party is The New Right, or HaYamin HeHadash, a faction announced on Saturday by ministers Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, who will break away from the Jewish Home party they led.

Slamming the “irresponsible” decision by Bennett and Shaked, Netanyahu said such divisions could bring “the left” to power, even suggesting that was the real purpose of the move.

“There are two dangers in this new party — the first is that it will crush the rightist bloc into splinter parties that will not pass the threshold, and the second is that no one knows what they will do with the mandates they will receive,” he said, suggesting they would support Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid as prime minister instead of him.

“They have already been in a fraternal alliance with the left, with Lapid, and they could move their mandates to the left,” Netanyahu said of Bennett and Lapid’s 2013 pact to jointly make demands for joining the coalition.

The New Right party said in response that it would “not be dragged into the prime minister’s attacks on us. We are returning the supporters that left the Likud to go to the left-wing bloc of [Benny] Gantz, Lapid and Orly Levy. We propose the prime minister join us in this mission.”

Gantz has emerged as a likely juggernaut as the election campaign kicks off, with polls indicating that the center-left Zionist Union and the centrist Yesh Atid party could each only present a real challenge to Netanyahu’s Likud if Gantz were to join their ranks.

Gantz formally entered politics Thursday with the registration of his new party, Israel Resilience. He has been largely mum on his political views and has not commented on whether he would join a Netanyahu-led government.

But in his first public reference to Gantz, Netanyahu said during Monday’s press conference that his silence indicates a left leaning.

“In my experience, anyone who says he does not know whether he is right or left is a leftist,” the prime minister said. “Let’s be honest: Anyone who says he is ‘neither one’ is usually left.”