Addressing settlers in the West Bank on Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an impassioned plea against voting for any of the new right-wing parties that have sprung up in recent months.
Dispersing votes between a smattering of different upstart parties would leave them all short of the 3.25 percent support they need to enter the Knesset, he warned. And even if a party does get in, it will be at the expense of an ideological compatriot, he complained.
“Whoever doesn’t pass the electoral threshold wastes their votes. Whoever does pass will take down an existing party,” Netanyahu declared, in his second such appeal in as many days. “So there’s only one message for all of the new right-wing parties: Leave, or unite with the existing parties. If you care about the future of the State of Israel, that’s what you need to do.”
Among those named by Netanyahu as a potential spoiler was Ofer Winter, a controversial former IDF general who earlier that evening had launched the right-wing People of Israel party, promising to “do everything to establish as broad a right-wing government as possible, with as many Zionist partners as possible.”
Winter is something of a wildcard. He has insisted that he and his colleagues are ”a clear, definitive part of the right-wing camp,” and has signaled that he would not support Netanyahu’s chief rival, Gadi Eisenkot, as prime minister. At the same time, Winter has harshly criticized Netanyahu’s leadership, maintaining that the public will not accept “everything remaining the same in the political sphere.”
