With less than week for the pivotal Israeli elections, polls show Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party losing ground to the centrist Zionist Union Party after weeks of being in a dead heat.
Most surveys are predicting that the Zionist Union could win up to 24 seats in the Israeli parliament, compared to Likud’s 21. If current trends continue, Israel will have a new prime minister come March 17th and would form a coalition government. Labour Party leader Issac Herzog would become prime minister for the first two years of the four-year term, then Zionist Union leader Tzipi Livni would take over the remaining two years.
Netanyahu is on the defensive, saying that a loss by Likud would put the country’s security at risk.
“If the gap between the Likud and Labor continues to grow, a week from now Herzog and Livni will become the prime ministers of Israel in rotation, with the backing of the Arab parties,” Netanyahu told the Jerusalem Post in a wide-ranging interview with the paper that is editorially friendly to the prime minister.
“That will cause such a monumental shift in policy that it is a danger, and anyone who wants to stop it has to vote Likud to narrow the gap. Yes, there will be pressures to withdraw to the (pre-) 1967 lines and divide Jerusalem. Yes, there will be pressures to relinquish our opposition to the Iranian (nuclear arms) deal. There is no privilege now to vote for other parties.”
