In a Zoom call with the Likud court a few weeks ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pushed for the cancellation of party primaries and the possibility to reserve six slots on the Likud's slate. The move was aimed at allowing him to include representatives of various sectors to the party's Knesset list to maximize the party's ability to extract every single possible right-wing vote.
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This time around, the right-wing bloc, which for the time being would be better termed the pro-Netanyahu bloc, looks poised to hold on to most of its votes. As part of Netanyahu's efforts to bring in Arab voters, the party added Arab Israeli educator and longtime Likud activist Nael Zoabi, to its slate on Thursday. The addition of author Gali Distel Etebaryan, whose opinion pieces have appeared in Israel Hayom, has excited many of Netanyahu's Russian Israeli supporters.
The religious Zionist sector will also be able to exhaust its voter potential with the alliance between Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionist Party and Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit and that party's core of ardent supporters.
Naftali Bennett's Yamina party is still on the fence, for the time being.
Netanyahu can also be pleased with what is happening over on the Left. Most polls predict Gantz, whose Blue and White party is capable of taking votes from the Right, failing to make it past the minimum electoral threshold. The Joint Arab List has broken up, and Yair Lapid is looking like the leader of the "anyone but Bibi" camp. The latter makes it easier for Netanyahu to make this election about Right versus Left, rather than Right versus Right, as he would if he were to contend with New Hope's Gideon Sa'ar.
Netanyahu is heading into the upcoming election having done as much as he could to exhaust the right-wing vote. Despite his best efforts, the coronavirus may be what ultimately decides how he fares on March 23. A massive outbreak in the days leading up to the election would spell disaster for the Likud, but if the vaccination campaign succeeds in reining in the pandemic, that will have a huge impact on Election Day.
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