January is a month Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like voters to forget. With the number of new daily infections still high and hospitals continuing to reports their coronavirus wards are full despite a lockdown, it's hard to imagine there being an end to this nightmare anytime soon.
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If that wasn't enough, his usual political partners, preferring to go to extremes, aren't helping the prime minister's election campaign either.
Within the Likud party, there is growing frustration with the Haredi factions in recent days. On one hand, they are loyal partners who, for the duration of three election campaigns, have stuck with Netanyahu come hell or high water.
Yet there is another side to consider, and it is growing more troublesome by the day. The media has once again adopted an explicitly anti-Haredi agenda. Open schools, mass weddings, and mass protests that see buses burned and police attacked are the highlight of every broadcast. Haredi lawmakers stand on the sidelines, helpless to act and not even bothering to try.
The person paying the price for all this is Netanyahu, who has avoided banging his fist on the table and cleaning up the mess. Public anger with the prime minister this week was double the usual, and the proof is in the polling: The Likud has lost the moderate and consistent increase it had seen in the polls in recent weeks and is now predicted to be the second largest party in the Knesset.
Senior Likud officials this week said the time has come for Netanyahu to go. Despite the clear political need and threats from United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni, who was "caught" threatening to reconsider his party's partnership with the Likud in a public phone call, they say the Likud will ultimately lose power. When that happens, they say, the Likud, but also the Haredi factions, will find themselves in the opposition.
The time has come, they argued, for Netanyahu to stop seeing the Haredi factions as partners he is dependent on and stop giving in to all of their whims as a matter of course. They believe that what they are seeing now is a political disaster in the making.
On Wednesday, Netanyahu made his choice. Likud officials in the Knesset's Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee were made to clarify they would vote to raise fines on lockdown violations, aligning with Blue and White's demands. The political price of giving in to the Haredim this time around and ending the lockdown ahead of the Health Ministry's demands is simply higher than that of opening a front against the Haredim.
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