Around three months ago, at the start of the election campaign, the polls predicted Yamina would garner nearly 20 Knesset seats. At the time, I tweeted that somehow or another, party head Naftali Bennett would end up, as he always does, wrapping up Election Day by calling on his "religious Zionist brothers" to cast their vote for him.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
How did a politician who started out as the leading candidate for the premiership, someone who directed his efforts at the general public and earned the support of centrists and members of the "soft" Right, end the election race deeply embedded once again in his home turf?
In my opinion, the answer is simpler than it appears. At the end of the day, politics are not a very flexible game. There are more or less fixed positions that represent large groups of voters, and the figures that fill these positions are sometimes trivial. On the Right, there is room for one ruling party and another with a religious orientation to that party's right. This is not the result of political decisions or wheelers and dealers but a reflection of the public's nature. In such a situation, no new leader, charismatic and ambitious as they may be, can come along and create something that will take the central party's place. A party needs voters, and on the Right, there simply aren't any extras waiting to be had.
Where can such an electorate be found? On the Center-Right, in the space filled at one point by Kulanu's Moshe Kahlon and now Yisrael Beytenu's Avigdor Lieberman. Bennett wanted more than anything to be the next big thing on the Right, but that position is simply not available.
When the polls were in his favor, it was because of the electorate in the center, and when New Hope entered the picture and vied for the same electorate, that changed everything. Add to that, Blue and White's Benny Gantz fighting for the same votes, and suddenly, the center also begins to feel a little crowded.
Moderate Center-Right voters that don't want Netanyahu or the Left had quite a few options available to them this time around, so Bennett headed back home. He went from talking about the coronavirus and livelihoods to adopting the talking points of the ideological Right: governance of the Negev and the Galilee, the courts, the labor unions, and so on and so forth. In effect, he went from appealing to the center to appealing to his home base and competing against Bezalel Smotich's Religious Zionism Party.
Bennett may not have wanted to, but he came home in the end. He didn't plan for it to end this way, but that's just the way the Israeli public is built.
Subscribe to Israel Hayom's daily newsletter and never miss our top stories!
