March 18, 2015 | Quote

Here’s Why Israel’s Elections Had Such a Shocking Conclusion

The results of yesterday's national elections in Israel rendered months of commentary utterly worthless.

Just about everyone got the Israeli election wrong: pollsters, analysts, journalists, opposition parties, and perhaps even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself believed they were watching a far different campaign than the one that was actually unfolding in front of them (in the interest of disclosure, neither of these pieces I wrote yesterday hold up very well, to put it mildly).

As Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy, explained to Business Insider, “Netanyahu knew he needed to to reset his coalition and put people back in line if he was going to ever govern.” That meant taming his coalition's restive and ever threatening right flank, which meant cannibalizing smaller rival parties.

This in turn required strategically tacking right and projecting strength on hot-button issues like the peace process and Iran's nuclear program. It also required calling elections at a time when there was no obvious threat to his rule — no charismatic or broadly respected center or left-wing figure who could credibly unseat him, and no real insurgent threat from politicians even further to his right. Rightist upstarts Naftali Bennet and Avigdor Lieberman are in worse shape today than they were before the right. The left-wing candidate Isaac Herzog ran an effective campaign that could set him up for the premiership. Just not this year.

It was possible to detect the residue of this strategy's future success even in polls that showed the Zionist Union ahead of Likud. If people were generally tired of Netanyahu, they were still supporting parties that he could easily raid for votes.

“The numbers were showing that people wanted Netanyahu to be prime minister, just not that people wanted to vote for him,” Schanzer explained. Despite what people actually told pollsters, they ended up voting in a way that preserved the right's hold on power even if they waited until election day to break for Netanyahu himself.

Read full article here.

Issues:

Israel