Transcript
A (0:04)
You are listening to an art media podcast.
B (0:13)
It's Friday, may 1st. This episode was recorded at 9pm new york time on Thursday. I'm deborah pardes and this is arc news daily. On Sunday, former Prime Minister Naftali Ali Bennett stood on stage with opposition leader Yair Lapid to launch a new joint political party. They called it Together. It was meant to be a show of unity and strength against current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But according to an explosive leak published yesterday, the new alliance may be neither. Israel's Channel 12 reported that in the days before the announcement, Bennett told associates that that Lapid is, quote, toxic, toxic, toxic. In the same private conversations, Bennett reportedly said the merger is, quote, a strategic mistake and that Lapid doesn't bring votes from the right, he drives them away to the right. In response to the leak, the joint party said the only thing that's toxic is Netanyahu's coalition. Bennett himself didn't immediately comment on the report. The leak undercuts the central premise of the merger. Bennett and Lapid sold it as a unified front that would be strong enough to take out Netanyahu. But the leak shows Bennett didn't even believe his own pitch. To understand why that matters, start with the central case against the merger that was already being made. Former Defense Minister Benny Gantz heads another opposition party and he argued this week that the alliance actually hurts the chances of replacing Netanyahu's government. The idea is that Lapid pushes away the right wing voters who might otherwise consider voting for Bennett. Lapid is a secular centrist, whereas Bennett comes from the religious right. The early polling backs that up. As ARC Media contributor Amit Sehgal noted on the latest episode of Call Me Back, the duo are attracting fewer votes together than they had separately.
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You saw in the polls the day after that, in each and every poll, the one plus one equals less than two.
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Even combined with the other opposition parties, the alliance is well short of the 61 seats they would need to form a government without Netanyahu. ARC Media contributor Nadav Eyal said on the same episode that Bennett's plan is to consolidate the entire anti Netanyahu bloc behind him. That way he can break right and bring in Likud voters. But pulling that off depends on one crucial thing.
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The only way he can do that is by seeming strong. This is really important in Israeli politics. If they feel that he is susceptible to pressure, fragile, then people usually start ejecting towards Bibi.
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Following the leak, the question is whether Bennett can even accomplish that first step of the plan. Unifying the opposition. A rising competitor for that role is former military chief of staff Gotti Eisenkot, who heads his own opposition party and, as Amit said on the podcast, has been climbing in the polls.