Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu tells a crowd at a campaign event in Ramle that he will make Amichai Chikli a minister if he retakes power, a day after the Central Elections Committee barred Chikli from running for Knesset.
Chikli, who had been placed #14 on Likud’s electoral slate, entered the Knesset last year with Yamina, but refused to vote in favor of the big tent coalition it enabled and led, and was later ejected from the faction.
Inviting Chikli on stage next to him at the campaign event, Netanyahu calls him a “fighter for truth and justice.”
MK Amichai Chikli at a Knesset House Committee meeting on the Yamina party’s request to declare him a ‘defector,’ on April 25, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“Amichai, those that don’t want you as an MK will get you as a minister,” he says.
The left-wing Meretz party had filed the petition to knock Chikli out of the race, claiming that he did not resign in a timely manner after leaving Yamina and thus should be personally sanctioned from running with a sitting Knesset party in November.
Likud has said it will petition the High Court to overturn the election panel decision, a standard practice.
Responding to the move to bar him on Wednesday evening, Chikli lamented the “bizarre and political decision” calling it “an unparalleled injustice.”
Israel allows parties to appoint ministers who are not elected members of the Knesset.
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