Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu took pains to downplay expectations this week in the face of polls predicting victory for his party in the Feb. 10 Israel election.
Netanyahu’s associates said he does not want to repeat a mistake made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who lost seats for his party two weeks before the 2006 elections when he told Russian immigrant voters that the race had already been decided.
“We need to get elected,” the former prime minister said at a Jan. 26 event with religious Zionist supporters. “We still have two weeks. Even though things look promising, they are not guaranteed.”
Netanyahu spoke amid reports that he had already decided to form a government with Labor and leave the current government of Kadima in the opposition. He was quoted as saying in closed conversations that “Kadima will stay out.”
His own Likud Party vigorously denied that he had made such a statement. Netanyahu’s advisers said he would form a national unity government, as he has promised repeatedly, and that he had no preference between including Labor or Kadima in the coalition.
“I’m with him all the time and he has never once said publicly or privately that he would not invite Kadima to his government,” adviser Ron Dermer said. “He will try to form the widest possible government and reach out to all of them, but whether they all decide to join is another matter.”
However, some senior Likud officials said Netanyahu would prefer Labor because he would want Labor chairman Ehud Barak, who currently serves as defense minister, to remain in the post with the Iranian nuclear threat looming. They pointed out that President Barack Obama has retained William Gates as his defense secretary for a similar reason, and that Netanyahu wanted to take advantage of the close relationship between Barak and Gates. Barak, like Netanyahu, is a former prime minister.
Barak is campaigning for the prime minister’s job along with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the leader of Kadima.
Those close to Netanyahu say that he hopes Livni’s party ends up in the opposition, and that many Kadima members defect to Likud, where most of them originally came from.
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit ruled out such a possibility at a Kadima press conference, saying that his party was ready to be “a fighting opposition” if necessary.
Vice Premier Haim Ramon warned the press not to assume that the election was over. He noted that some 30 percent of the electorate was still undecided, and said that two weeks before an election that number was usually no more than 15 percent.
“Anyone talking about coalitions and who will be finished politically is making a big mistake,” Ramon said. “First of all, it’s arrogant and arrogance loses votes. I know, because we did it ahead of the last election.”
Kadima presented an image of victory at a rally
Jan. 26 in Sderot. Mayor David Buskila, of Kadima, paid tribute to Livni in a half-hour speech, crediting her with the success of Operation Cast Lead. Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik went further, saying, “Livni initiated the operation.”
But Livni suffered a blow earlier in the week when Israel’s Channel 2 reported that her brother, Eli Livni, met Jan. 26 with Netanyahu and agreed to work for Likud in the election.