They are not the only likely losers from a new election. The wunderkind of the last election was TV personality Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid party. A bit of a Seinfeldian party, one about nothing, Lapid rode to power by painting himself as the voice of irate middle class Israelis upset at housing prices and determined to end exemptions from military service for religious yeshiva students. After rising from nothing to 19 seats, Lapid was invited into the coalition and made Minister of Finance, a politically thankless position even for someone who had once taken freshman economics, which Lapid had not. Determined to do “something” as Finance Minister, Lapid introduced a moronic proposal for reducing housing prices by increasing the demand for housing (granting new home buyers exemptions from Value-Added Taxes). Then in recent months he introduced proposals for rent controls, price controls in some other markets, and boosts in the minimum wage. Years ago I proposed requiring prospective Ministers of Finance to be able to get a B minus on an exam in Economics 101 and Lapid illustrates what happens when there is no such requirement.
Having delivered nothing, Lapid’s party will probably lose at least half its electoral strength. There is a popular Israeli pop song about “My heart is Racing a New Guy is Coming to the Neighborhood.” Well that new guy is Moshe Kahlon. He is a well-liked good-looking ex-Likud politician with a very bright public image, considered honest and intelligent and clean. He was the father of the reform and shakeup of the cell phone industry in Israel which resulted in sharp drops in prices for consumers. He is setting up his own new party, so far unnamed, and it will run as the party of the middle class. In other words, he will be out-Lapiding Yair Lapid. His entry onto the stage dooms Lapid to an even sharper decline.
Yisrael Beiteinu, the party of sharp-tongued Russian immigrant strongman and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is also due to take a drumming. In the last election, it did not run as a separate party, but rather as part of a merger with the Likud. So its own electoral popularity was not really put to the test, as it will be this winter. In the past it managed to draw support from Israeli “hawks,” above and beyond its power base among Russian Jewish immigrants to Israel, and was helped by being the party most hated by the Far Left. But in the last election its ability to attract “hawks” was already being undercut by the emergence of Naftali Bennett’s “Jewish Home” party. And Lieberman has been involved in other shenanigans that are likely to undercut his popularity, such as his leading an anti-democratic campaign to shut down a daily newspaper because its editorial line is pro-Netanyahu.
Naftali Bennett’s “Jewish Home” party was one of the great winners in the last election, winning 12 seats. He would have likely done even better had not the Likud focused most of its attack ads and energies in the last weeks before the last election on attacking Bennett. While Bennett and Netanyahu do not like one another at the personal level, and while the party has lost some of its glamour in some missteps and foolish policy positions, particular by Uri Ariel, Minister of Construction, Bennett’s party is still the only reliably “hawkish” party left in the arena and is likely to benefit from the shifts in public sentiment.
The rest of the Knesset is unlikely to change much in the new election. The religious parties and the Arab fascist parties will probably keep their strength at current levels. The rump “Kadima” party of Shaul Mofaz will go the way of the dodo bird after the election.