Netanyahu said to warn Likud members of threat from new centrist party

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly warned members of his Likud party that a former member of the right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party who has struck out on her own is not a true right-winger.

Netanyahu made the comments about independent MK Orly Levy-Abekasis, who recently unveiled her new party ahead of the upcoming elections, during a private conversation with Likud members, the Kan public broadcaster reported Wednesday.

For several months polls have indicated that a party led by Levy-Abekasis would win five to eight seats in the election, which earlier this week was formally set for April 9.

The prime minister, who leads the Likud party, said Levy-Abekasis’s political views lie somewhere between the center-left Labor and the hard-left Meretz party.

“Orly Levy is part of the left-wing bloc,” he reportedly said. “Whoever thinks she is part of the right-wing bloc is mistaken.”

Netanyahu also reportedly spoke of a concern that Levy will declare during her campaign that she will not join a government led by him, a development he said would be “a danger to the right-wing camp.”

The Likud party denied the report, telling Kan that Netanyahu has not yet made any comments about Levy-Abekasis either publicly or privately.

Levy-Abekasis entered the Knesset nine years ago as a member of hawkish former defense minister Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu. But in May 2016, she announced that she would leave the party over its entry into the government, saying that the party had abandoned its social platform during negotiations to enter the coalition. She has since been serving as an independent MK in the opposition.

The daughter of former long-time legislator and foreign minister David Levy, Levy-Abekasis on Tuesday announced she was setting up a new party called Gesher (Bridge), which has the same name as her father’s faction of 20 years ago.

“When you choose a name you want to infuse it with meaning,” she told Hadashot TV news on Tuesday and noted she is neither extremely right nor extremely left.

“The layout is of people from the right and from the left, from the cities and the periphery, from places that feel that the government did not count them and want to reach places where decisions are made in the country,” she said in explaining the voter base she is aiming for.

She is hard to classify politically, having made her name with activism on behalf of children, the elderly, and the poor. She has not yet specified who else would represent her party.

On Wednesday evening the Knesset dissolved itself and confirmed the April 2019 election date, seven months earlier than the scheduled November vote.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.