2 min read
ByAnshel Pfeffer, Anshel Pfeffer
Members of Israel's opposition parties could be enticed by Benjamin Netanyahu into the governing coalition
April 11, 2019 07:46Despite having won an equal number of seats to Likud, Benny Gantz’s Blue & White party will struggle to stick together now it is heading for opposition.
In a joint statement by the alliance’s leadership on Wednesday, Mr Gantz said: “We have reached an incredible result and more than a million people put in the ballot box a party they did not even know existed nine or ten weeks ago. We really have built a true alternative to the government.”
But now, that alternative needs to find common purpose outside of government. Many of the 35 new Knesset members of Blue & White — which include right-wingers, left-wingers and non-aligned centrists — barely even knew each other three months ago.
They include members of Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid; the Resilience party founded by Mr Gantz a month before he joined forces with Yesh Atid; and Telem, a right-wing party led by Moshe Yaalon. On paper, all these parties are still separate identities, despite having run on a single list of candidates.
It is not just about filing the paperwork, though. Some of Blue & White’s members already feel that Yesh Atid, the only one of the three to have party institutions and an organisational structure, already feel Mr Lapid’s supporters are muscling in.
Blue & White ran as a duopoly of Mr Gantz and Mr Lapid, with former IDF chiefs of staff Moshe Yaalon and Gabi Ashkenazi in supporting roles. But Mr Gantz was not particularly effective on the campaign trial and is a newcomer to politics. It is now not clear who the party’s true leader is.
On Wednesday night, Mr Gantz said that “the fight isn’t yet over” and Mr Lapid promised: “We are going to make the lives of Likud and the coalition hell. The days in which the opposition tried to crawl into the government are over.”
But the tools at the Israeli opposition’s disposal are limited, especially since Blue & White is not assured of the cooperation of their other opposition colleagues in the Knesset.
Labour and Meretz, the parties to Blue & White’s left, are still smarting at the way the new alliance “cannibalised” their voters. And the two Arab parties in the chamber were put on notice at the very start of the election campaign that, should Blue & White win, they would not be invited to join the coalition.
One option being mused in the new party is to appoint a shadow cabinet — a standard practice in British politics, but unknown in Israel. If the party has effective spokespeople who can study the relevant fields and shadow the actual ministers, it would be a refreshing change to the usual haphazard opposition operation.
But the biggest worry within the alliance is that some of its members may be enticed into Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, which would lead to a swift disintegration. Centrist parties in Israel rarely last for more than two election cycles before breaking into pieces.
