Sitting in a political traffic jam

Can you whiff that wafting through the air, the smell of elections? No ballot slips are being drawn up, there are no annoying ads by no-name parties playing constantly on the radio and the coalition still lives. But reading the tea leaves packed into Tuesday morning’s print pages one can’t help but get the sense that early elections are being cooked up.

Chief among those signs is the return Monday of former Likud minister Gideon Sa’ar, but it’s also coupled with a pre-holiday toast by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that sounded more like a Trump style, anti-media rabble-rousing stump speech than the “way to go, workers” these addresses usually are. And of course, the ongoing soap opera over the future of the new public broadcaster.

Sa’ar’s return to politics, which surprised exactly nobody, gets front page treatment in broadsheet Haaretz, which reports that “sources in Likud assessed that Sa’ar decided to make his comeback in light of the estimation that elections will be moved up and take place in just a few months.”

The paper notes that Netanyahu’s place at the top of the Likud list is already guaranteed, but Sa’ar can compete for another senior spot and position himself to be next in line should the prime minister be ousted over the graft investigations against him.

Columnist Yossi Verter, taking notice of Sa’ar’s mostly fawning speech toward Netanyahu, surmises that he is playing the long game, writing that the former and likely future minister is not “suicidal.”

“Sa’ar wants to be there, in the heart of the posse, on the cusp of competing for the head of the party, whether that will come because of an indictment against Netanyahu, or after a loss at the polls, or the next time Likud’s bylaws call for it to have a primary, around 2023,” he writes.

“If he wants to lead the government he needs to be there. The law says only a sitting MK can be prime minister, So he’ll run next time on the Likud list, will try again for first place and will wait. Like everyone. They are good at waiting. They are used to waiting. Patience is their middle name.”

A column on Sa’ar by Israel Hayom’s Mati Tuchfeld is eerily similar, starting off by noting how Sa’ar’s return was expected by all and going on to write that he has no choice but to play the waiting game. But whereas Verter saw it as a necessary move, Tuchfeld seems to think it was mistimed.

“Since entering politics, Sa’ar hasn’t only been a shrewd politician and a sharp thinker, but also a media favorite. That’s still true now. The fact that he conquered the main newscasts testifies to this, but it seems there’s not much more than that. The primaries for the head of Likud already took place, and all Sa’ar has left to do now is wait for his turn to possibly come,” he writes.

One person who will never get mistaken for a media darling is the man Sa’ar would like to replace, Netanyahu, and a speech by the prime minister on Monday in which he termed the media an “industry of dismay” isn’t going to win him any plaudits from the free press any time soon.

Yedioth Ahronoth, though, wins the taking-things-way-too-literally award, juxtaposing Netanyahu’s comment that “They see traffic jams and I see interchanges” with not one but two pictures of actual traffic jams, as if to thereby prove that the prime minister is wrong.

While the pictures are worth less than a thousand words, columnist Sima Kadmon makes up for it by tearing Netanyahu’s speech to shreds with the force of her mighty pen (or keyboard).

“Yes, Mr. Prime Minister, we are dismayed,” she writes. “And no, it’s not because we see unemployment where you see industry, or a destroyed economy where the economy is thriving. Correct, the economy is thriving, there is industry, and even the traffic jams — those we get stuck in while you are behind a tinted window and armored cars that clear the way for you see only interchanges — they are not the cause for the dismay. We can live with the traffic. We can even be happy with what we have. It’s you, prime minister. You are the dismayer. You are the reason we wake up each morning hopeless, faithless, disquieted. It’s you and your government, a flock of silent sheep, a gaggle of yes-men doing your bidding.”

If there’s one media outlet where Netanyahu is a darling, it’s Israel Hayom, and the prime minister’s words come against the background of a political fight to possibly create another outlet that will be under his thumb, or at least not as critical as Kadmon and her dismayed ilk.

In the aforementioned tabloid, columnist Haim Shine takes Netanyahu’s side in lamenting the fact that the new broadcaster could have leftists among its staff, but also criticizes the government for screwing up by acting too late and not working to create a system where there is no public broadcaster at all.

“The right has failed in [opening up] the media industry. There’s no real pluralism, licenses and franchises are given out sparingly, and entrepreneurs are not encouraged to enter this media market. As a result, the Left still controls the media with an iron grip,” he writes. “It is high time to reform taxpayer-funded public broadcasting, despite the complex nature of such a task and the problematic timing. There is simply no other choice — if we are going to be a free people, as our anthem says, we must be free from biased public broadcasting.”

Meanwhile, it’s not even clear that Netanyahu will get his way in keeping the new broadcaster from having an independent news division, with Haaretz reporting that opposition to the deal between Netanyahu and Moshe Kahlon is mounting, with court petitions, labor leaders threatening strikes and Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit facing a mutiny in his office for signing off on the agreement. And that’s not all.

“Political observers are increasingly convinced that the agreement on the future of public broadcasting reached by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon last week will not be implemented in its current format, because the proposed time frame is impossible and alternatives could cause significant budget overruns,” the paper reports.