September 4 election day to be set by Netanyahu Sunday night

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to formally kick off campaign season Sunday by announcing September 4 elections.

After a week of being in the wings, while mourning his father’s death, Netanyahu will take center stage at the Likud party convention in the Tel Aviv fairgrounds Sunday evening to name the date.

Elections buzz has been in the air for weeks already. The  main coalition parties chose the date, and the Knesset is now legislating its dispersal.

The political world is warming up for a summer of campaigning, with a quick round of internal primaries still in store for some of the candidates and parties.

The Likud convention gives Netanyahu the opportunity to make changes to the structure and makeup of the Knesset list. Likud is set to hold its primaries in June.

The convention is also expected to elect Netanyahu as
temporary party president, adding to his control over proceedings.

A recent Maariv poll has the Likud winning  31 out of the 120 available Knesset seats, giving Netanyahu the likely first shot at forming a new coalition.

Labor is on track to become the second largest party, with 18 seats, according to the survey.

Led by its new chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich, Labor would like to revive its glory days as the country’s ruling party. Yachimovich said, in a Saturday interview to Channel 2, that people must stop being fixated with the notion that only Netanyahu can be prime minister. But in the same interview, she said that she would not rule out participating in a coalition led by him. “Politics is a means to an end,” she said. “Not an end in itself.” Her first goal was indeed to oust Netanyahu, but if she could not, in the interim she might have to work with him toward her wider agenda, she said.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party is predicted to win 12 seats. Kadima, under the new leadership of Shaul Mofaz, and the recently founded Yesh Atid party, led by political newcomer Yair Lapid, are each set to win 11 seats, according to the survey — which would mean a remarkable debut for Lapid and a disaster for Kadima, which holds 28 seats in the outgoing parliament.

There has been much discussion over the reasons for holding elections nearly a year before their scheduled date. Some of those suggested include: potential inability to pass a budget, strife over legislation ordering the enlistment to military or national service for ultra-Orthodox Jews, and anticipation of social upheaval as the result of citizen unrest over cost of living issues.

But on Friday, Channel 2’s senior analyst Amnon Abramovich said Netanyahu is calling early elections so that he and his transition government will be free to deal with Iran’s nuclear program this fall, with a fresh mandate from the public, before the election of a US president, and with Defense Minister Ehud Barak — who may be a political casualty of the elections — still at his side.

In response, the left-wing Meretz party chairwoman Zahava Gal-On said Saturday that the notion that Israel could attack Iran while the US president is engaged in election campaigning and the Knesset is in recess was illegitimate and “childish.”

“The idea of taking advantage of the fact that the parents are away from home is childish because the parents will return and the punishment will be severe,” said Gal-On. “An interim government lacks the moral authority and public legitimacy to take such action.”