Everyone knows that the coming Israel election, to be held March 17, is a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“It becomes clear that the election on 17 March is increasingly seen as a referendum on Netanyahu’s time in office,” wrote London’s Guardian. The Economist quoted Israel’s Channel 2 saying, “At the end of the day, these elections are all about a referendum on Bibi.” The Associated Press proclaimed, “The coming Israeli election amounts to a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu.” And the Washington Post told readers that “political analysts and journalists were calling this election the ‘Bibi referendum.’”
There are many more examples of this trope, and they are all wrong. This election in Israel is instead a referendum on Isaac “Buji” Herzog, the opposition candidate for prime minister.
Netanyahu has served as prime minister for ten years and been in politics for decades. He is a known quantity, and his poll numbers are not good. As Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher found out, ten years is a long time and one builds up critics, opponents, and enemies. The public gets tired. There are almost inevitably scandals. A December survey “asked respondents whether they want Netanyahu to remain prime minister after the vote. Sixty percent said no.”
So why does this not mean that Netanyahu is done for, and that Herzog will be the next PM? Because Israeli voters do not trust him—yet. Recent polls have shown between 18 and 24 percent of Israelis are undecided—the swing voters who will decide the election. Though Herzog is 54 years old, is the son of Israel’s sixth president, has been in the Knesset since 2003, and has served as a cabinet minister several times, he’s not a well-known quantity. He has led his Labor Party only since November 2013. One year ago a third of Israeli voters knew little about him, and even now twenty percent “say they don’t have an opinion of him or have never heard of him,” according to the Times of Israel. That number will continue to decline as the election nears, but it is amazingly high for the man leading the main opposition party.
Israel is beset with security challenges: Iran and Hezbollah have troops fighting in Syria, ISIS spreads nearby, Iran’s nuclear weapons program is advancing, Hamas runs Gaza, and of course the administration in Washington is hostile to Israel while accommodating to Iran. For undecided Israeli voters the question is not “do I love Bibi,” it is “can I trust Buji to protect this country?” Herzog’s boyish looks and lack of charisma do not help him, nor does the fact that his IDF service was not in a combat unit. The Labor Party has usually addressed these security worries by having a general lead the ticket, and it won under former chiefs of staff Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. It has been thirty years since Labor won with a civilian. That was Shimon Peres in 1984—but even then Labor did not get enough seats to form a government on its own and had to join in a coalition with Likud. So it is fair to say that the last time a Labor Party civilian won a clear mandate to rule without the right was with Golda Meir in 1969—ancient history for most Israelis.
One possible outcome this year is a repetition of the 1984 outcome—a very close election leading to a Labor/Likud deal and a grand coalition, where Herzog would perhaps serve as deputy prime minister and foreign minister under Netanyahu. Or, Herzog may persuade voters one way or the other—to trust him and give him the Knesset seats needed to form a governing coalition, or to turn away and stick with Bibi despite whatever complaints they may have.
The race is on: will Herzog define himself in the next 3 weeks as solid and reliable, or will Netanyahu define him as a nice young fellow who simply isn’t tough enough to be prime minister of Israel?
It’s a referendum all right, but on Buji more than Bibi.
