Netanyahu's initiative to postpone the presidential elections doesn't even shock me anymore. The hallucinations and paranoia that our prime minister is operating in have long been our reality. He's trying to dismantle Kadima, passes the Mofaz Law by force and then shamelessly repeals it in the subsequent Knesset, dismisses the Knesset speaker, doesn't staff the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee for six months, can't make a decision on the Home Front Defense Ministry, is basing all of his coalition negotiations on a strange personal grudge against Naftali Bennett in the government (he leaked Bibi Torres...) and God knows what else we don't know. In short, it would surprise me if he wasn't paranoidly obsessed with blocking Ruben Rivlin's entry into the presidential residence at all costs. What is surprising? Yair Lapid - we came to change - heard about it two weeks ago and didn't kill it on the spot. Naftali Bennett, who currently cannot reach an agreement with Bibi on the direction from which the sun rises, heard and did not respond publicly to this day. That Mrs. Klein (retired) missed an opportunity to say "so far", I will not give a hand to your stinking tricks. So why? One explanation I heard from one of the trio said - it will die anyway, why be the one who ruins the relationship with the Prime Minister. After all, we know that it is very important to Sarah.
Well, that's a great excuse, but that's not the real reason.
The real reason is that Netanyahu, who went amok, simply burned down (his) club.
He offered the trio (plus Yvette) a temptation that was hard to resist. Instead of the president assigning the task of forming a government to the Knesset member who has the best chances (the current method), we will change the law so that the task of forming a government will automatically be assigned to the head of the largest party.
In 2007, this idea came up during the Olmert government. At that time, I was still talking to Netanyahu. I asked him about it in a hallway conversation in the Knesset. He firmly rejected it. It would move the blackmail process from after the elections to before the elections, he explained. It would not achieve anything. It is not democratic for a party that wins a single mandate, Netanyahu told me, to form the government without having a real majority.
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In the background was a political logic that every idiot understands, and those who didn't understand, came in the 2009 elections and explained it. For the leader of the right-wing bloc, this is a horrifying proposition. The automatic alliance with Yvette and the Haredim brings a government, even when the Likud is worth twenty seats. True, since then, the Likud and the Haredim have not been a romance, but I still want to see Litzman and Gafni recommend the leader of the left-wing camp to the president.
Just so you understand the depth of the madness in the Netanyahu household – Netanyahu's new initiative throws the right's greatest advantage out the window, in favor of a pathetic attempt to prevent (postpone?) Rivlin's entry into the presidential palace.
Netanyahu's only substantive argument (substantial by Netanyahu's standards) is that President Rivlin will not assign him the task of forming a government. Netanyahu surely knows that a president's room for maneuver after an election is zero. During his term, President Peres assigned Livni once (which failed) and Netanyahu twice. Not a word of criticism was heard. Not even from the greatest delusional figures in the political arena, because that was obvious. Only once did the president have a real role, Herzog in '84.
So here is Netanyahu's political calculation:
To prevent the almost non-existent probability that there will be a tie like that one time in 1984, and right-wing President Rivlin will assign the task of forming a government to the leftist candidate, we are going for a solution that poses a much greater threat, which would be a union on the left that would create the head of a larger party, that is, a prime minister.
This already explains the silence of the three coalition faction leaders and Yvette's public support. If Bibi agrees to this, Livni will go from being a political corpse to a sought-after asset in the center-left. Bozi could give her the number 2 position in the Labor Party so that she will bring him two or three more seats. Bennett will become a person who is very much courted by the Likud, who will want to make sure that they remain the largest party and will be willing to pay a premium to "Beit Yehudi" for a union. Bennett will become a leading candidate for the head of the united party, "Likud-Beit Yehudi." Lieberman will go from the man that Danny Danon does not let get close to the Likud, to the man that the Likud will pay any price to run with him in the elections.
And Yair, Yair Lapid will be able to dream of becoming the head of the largest party, that is, prime minister. Oh, how nice to daydream. The fact that all four of these respected politicians, who know exactly how Netanyahu treats his word, are willing to be dragged into this humiliating journey, in exchange for some abstract promise on ice, shows that yes, it is possible to fool the whole world all the time.
From Raviv Drucker's website:
http://drucker10.net
