Likud offers creative solution to allow Jewish Home MK to take spot on slate

Presenting its Knesset slate to the Central Elections Committee, Likud reveals a creative solution to potential legal problems created by its deal with the Jewish Home to give a spot to one of the religious Zionist party’s candidates.

According to the agreement signed yesterday, Jewish Home’s appointee for the Likud number 28 spot — reserved by the ruling party for a Netanyahu appointee — will be MK Eli Ben Dahan. In exchange, the Jewish Home agreed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s request for them to join with the extremist Otzma Yehudit party in order to prevent lost votes on the right.

Facing legal challenges both from within the ruling party’s ranks and outside of it,  Likud officially presented a joint list with the defunct Achi party, registering Ben Dahan as a member of the faction formed in the 1990s and not of the ruling party.

Doing so prevents petitions against the move both in Likud internal courts and in the Central Elections Committee.

The complaint against the move from within Likud claims that since Ben Dahan is not a member of the party, he is not eligible to receive the spot reserved for Netanyahu’s choice.

An appeal filed Thursday with the Central Elections Committee argues that allowing one party’s lawmaker to run in another party should be seen as a form of election fraud, as it constitutes an agreement between politicians to use votes for one party and artificially deliver them to another.

Registering Ben Dahan as a member of a different party which then unites with the Likud ostensibly bypasses both problems.

A party official told The Times of Israel that Netanyahu was behind the move. “He’s the magician, no?” they said, referring to a nickname for the prime minister based on his repeated use of political tricks to get out of tricky situations.

— Raoul Wootliff