Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to quell speculation that he may be headed to elections.
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The speculation is not without cause. Next week, the Knesset will take up Finance Minister Yair Lapid’s controversial bill cutting the value-added tax from certain purchases of new homes – a bill Lapid has suggested must pass if he is to remain in the coalition.
On Monday, Netanyahu announced he was withdrawing support for a controversial conversion bill that pitted Justice Minister Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua party against Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home. The bill had passed its first Knesset vote in the spring with Netanyahu’s support, but would have a hard time passing the next two votes required to become law without the prime minister.
Livni has said she saw the bill’s passage as a make-or-break question for her own membership in the coalition. Some Jewish Home officials have suggested that they, too, are ready to reconsider their presence in the government if the coalition pushes through unpalatable liberalizing reforms of Israel’s religious institutions.
A lot of senior politicians seem to believe threatening to leave the coalition, an act that would topple the government and precipitate early elections, is a reasonable negotiating tactic.
And then there are those suspiciously timed Likud primaries. In recent weeks, Netanyahu has been trying to arrange snap primaries in the Likud – primaries he is expected to win, and which would prepare the party for elections.
Put all these signals together, and elections seem around the corner.
But this assessment, argued by the largest media outlets in Israel in recent days, is almost certainly wrong.
On Tuesday, at a small party celebrating his 65th birthday, Netanyahu reportedly said that “elections are the last thing the people of Israel need right now.”
It is an interesting report, first publicized by Israel Radio, in part because the event at which the prime minister spoke took place in his own office, and the only people in the room were Netanyahu’s closest staff. One can safely assume the leak was not accidental.
Also Tuesday, Environment Minister Amir Peretz – of Livni’s Hatnua – went to the trouble of publicly declaring at an event in the south that recent talk of a “crisis in the coalition” was “exaggerated” and should be toned down “to the right proportions.”
Livni’s own statements about the conversion bill decidedly skirted the question of leaving the coalition, with the justice minister merely vowing to continue to fight for the bill.
And Lapid offered this explicit statement on Tuesday to the Walla news site: “There is no crisis. The coalition is strong and the government isn’t about to fall.”
Significantly, these statements come after conversations earlier this week between Netanyahu and every party leader in his coalition, in which the prime minister assured them he had no intention to break up the government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hatnua party leader Tzipi Livni during a joint press conference announcing their coalition deal, Jerusalem, Tuesday, February 19, 2013 (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hatnua party leader Tzipi Livni at the joint press conference where Livni announced she was joining Netanyahu’s government as minister of justice, February 19, 2013. (Photo credit: Miriam Alster/FLASH90)
But what of the snap primaries?
As noted last week in The Times of Israel, Netanyahu’s primaries gambit is driven by internal challenges he faces within his Likud party, not by any fears he has for the government in the national political arena.
In late December or early January (the exact date has not been set), the Likud Central Committee is slated to meet to vote on a series of changes to the party’s constitution and bylaws. Netanyahu hopes to bring to that gathering a handful of constitutional amendments intended to strengthen his control over the party’s political leadership, such as an amendment that would allow the party’s leader to choose one out of every 10 Knesset members on the party list without resort to primaries.
Netanyahu believes he will find it easier to get his way in the Central Committee if he can show up to the meeting having already won the primaries and secured his position as party leader until after the next national election.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu’s efforts faced a setback as Central Committee chairman MK Danny Danon announced he would not allow the Central Committee to meet next week – as Netanyahu wished – to set a time for the primaries. Instead, Danon said in a statement, “I will suggest to the chairman of the party [Netanyahu] reasonable dates for holding a respectable, fair contest worthy of a ruling party.”
Danny Danon (photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Danny Danon (photo credit: Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
Those dates will be in “two or three months’ time,” Danon later explained – or immediately after the December-January constitutional gathering for which Netanyahu is preparing so assiduously.
Danon’s announcement is part of a long-running skirmish between him and the prime minister over control of the Central Committee and the party apparatus generally.
Danon’s move is reasonable, and even clever, as a means of weakening Netanyahu ahead of the internal constitutional fight in December. And his own explanation for his actions leaves little room for doubt that this is the case: “The Likud movement is in a process of awakening, and I won’t allow it to be shut down and have its members silenced once again,” he said in the Tuesday statement.
That is, he won’t let Netanyahu expand his power in the party at the expense of the institution Danon himself leads.
But if the pushing up of the primaries was intended to prepare the party for imminent elections, then Danon’s move is incomprehensibly foolish and self-defeating. Danon would be harmed too if the party found itself poorly prepared for imminent national elections.
Netanyahu’s coalition partners may be threatening, but they are also working hard to tamp down any expectation that they might have to act on those threats. And the timing of Netanyahu’s own efforts to prepare Likud for elections has little to do with the state of his coalition and everything to do with his own position in his party. Despite the rampant talk of elections, there is no hard evidence in the political system itself that they are near.