Winter says it may have been a mistake to pledge early support for Netanyahu, but now stands by move

People of Israel party leader Ofer Winter says it “may not have been right” to announce at the start of his election campaign that his party would recommend only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as premier after the vote.

“Maybe it wasn’t necessarily right to say that at the beginning,” Winter says in a Channel 12 interview, but also says: “I’m part of the right-wing camp, and I’m not saying now that I’ll move to the other side.”

Netanyahu’s Likud claims Winter’s new remarks show he will take votes from the right and give them to a “left-wing government” led by Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot.

The comments come amid a public campaign by Likud and its allies to pressure Winter to withdraw from next week’s election, warning that his party could take votes from right-wing parties and waste them if it fails to cross the electoral threshold.

Responding to the pressure on Winter, Yoseph Haddad, the No. 2 candidate on the People of Israel list, insists that the party will remain loyal to Netanyahu despite what he describes as a campaign of attacks and smears by the prime minister and his allies.

“Party chairman Ofer Winter said from the very beginning that we would recommend Netanyahu, and that is what we will do, even when Netanyahu himself and others in the coalition are going after us and working against us,” Haddad says.

“We are part of the right-wing camp,” he adds, insisting that the party will not “move a millimeter from the promises we made to the public.”