In the Israeli electoral landscape, there is only one leader capable of unseating Benjamin Netanyahu. He's done it before, more than once, and if current indications hold, he can surely do it again.
With some 100 days remaining before Israelis go to the polls, the prime minister has but one serious rival standing between him and re-election: Benjamin Netanyahu.
It won't take a cataclysm. Chances are, Iran's nuclear facilities will be essentially unchanged by January 22 – 500 additional kilos of 3.5 percent enriched uranium in Iran's basement larders notwithstanding – and Tel Aviv will be as intact as it ever is.
No, the centrifuges which can do Netanyahu in, are of his own spinning.
First, there is the matter of Netanyahu himself. To be specific, the infelicitous cocktail of fear and arrogance. As he showed at the close of his first term in office, in 1999, the longer he stays in office, the more arrogant he seems to grow, and the more fearful.
The result may be the blend of self-satisfaction and disengagement from the public mood, that helped remove him from office his first time around.
Across the political spectrum, Netanyahu's support is a mile wide and a drop deep. The right distrusts him for agreeing -to a ten-month partial settlement freeze, breaking a verbal barrier to acknowledgement of the goal of a two-state solution, and overseeing the evacuation and demolition of a small number of landmark illegal outposts.
The left distrusts him for a slavish, perhaps sentimental subservience to the right, even when the center might seem more politically advantageous.
There is the middle class, to whom Netanyahu has yet to deliver on pledges of lower taxes (taxes are up), a more competition-driven economy (prices of basic goods are up and still rising), affordable housing (a central sore point of the government), and changing a state of affairs in which the preponderance of wealth is in the hands of a few powerful families (which have benefited from having chunks of gargantuan outstanding loans forgiven).
Then there are the horses on which Netanyahu has placed his bets, the foundations of the stability that has become the cornerstone of the prime minister's campaign.
There is Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, with his unerring knack for making Netanyahu government economic policy appear even more callous and elitist than it actually is.
Steinitz is perhaps the Likud's most unlikely public face. A former marcher with Peace Now, he now belongs to a political club which not only despises and distrusts the left, but favors those literally, tribally born into the right.
He is a former philosophy professor in an electoral climate which detests eggheads. He was a vocal early critic of a proposed prisoner exchange for captive soldier Gilad Shalit, a deal which later proved to be the Netanyahu government's only wildly popular decision.
Steinitz is, in short, no Moshe Kahlon. Kahlon is charming, charismatic, one of seven children of Libyan immigrants, a hugely popular politician (in itself, an oxymoron) for singlehandedly demolishing the gluttonous cartel of cellular phone monopolies, and for winning lower electricity rates for poor families.
Although this may be more perception than reality, Steinitz also appears to be one reason that Kahlon, the Likud's signal campaign asset, the one minister Netanyahu suggested the others all emulate, left the bus this week, after learning he would not be in the running for the treasury post, and won't be on the Likud ticket this election.
There are the other central pillars of Netanyahu's stability platform. There is Ehud Barak, an electoral liability at best, with a taste for going rogue at just the wrong time. There is Avigdor Lieberman, whose past relationships with Netanyahu have been fraught at times, and who has been rumored to be flirting with the possibility of a back room alliance with Netanyahu's shadow opponent, former prime minister Ehud Olmert.
Then there is Eli Yishai. Just when the undiluted support of Shas seemed assured, former party chairman Aryeh Deri arrived to cloud the picture. If Shas spiritual leader Ovadia Yosef brings Deri back into the fold as party chair, Netanyahu's lock on Shas support could be easily picked, or changed. If Deri goes it alone, the Likud could directly lose three or four game-changing seats to a Deri-led party.
And more intangibles await. If Kahlon's departure were not enough, attorney Eldad Yaniv, once a senior aide to then-prime minister Barak, has waded back into politics with a promise to disclose volatile and potentially damaging material on Netanyahu, among others.
"There's an enormous conspiracy of silence, on the part of journalists, bodyguards, political aides, of politicians, who know exactly how the system works," Yaniv said on Tuesday, hinting darkly at financial impropriety on the part of a prime minister hiding dollars in his socks.
Netanyahu has denied Yaniv's implications, as have others cited by Yaniv as witnesses. The prime minister and the supposed witnesses are threatening to sue Yaniv over his remarks.
One hundred days. If the coming weeks unfold like this one, the prime minister may well find himself running a campaign quite different from the one he began on Monday night.
Netanyahu was supposed to take this one in a walk. But if he's not careful, he may find himself, once again, running for his political life.
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