It’s been obvious for months that the right-wing Yamina party would benefit from spending some time in the opposition. But no one imagined just how much.
The last four months have been the first time Yamina leader Naftali Bennett — or any Yamina MK, for that matter — has actually sat in the opposition. And support for the party has more than doubled.
Surveys this week gave Yamina between 13 and 16 seats, increasing as the week passed. That’s more than double the six seats Bennett’s party won in the March election. Likud, meanwhile, is polling at 31 seats (in a Wednesday poll by Panels Politics), a drop of 10 seats from the ruling party’s polling figures a month ago.
The shift of so many seats from Likud to Yamina is no mystery. Bennett has led an energetic campaign against the government’s coronavirus policy — and, implicitly, against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s many distractions and political maneuvers undertaken while Israelis lost jobs and businesses shuttered around the country. “If it isn’t our livelihoods, it doesn’t matter,” ran the Yamina campaign, a tag line that accompanied every photo of Bennett as he traveled the country and met with Israelis who have watched as their incomes evaporated in the coronavirus-induced shrinking of the economy.
Bennett has spent the better part of the past four months urging a dramatic shift in Israel’s response to the virus that includes ramping up testing, giving the army a larger role in quickly building a mass-testing and isolation capacity, and using that capability to isolate the infected while keeping the economy open. He called it the “tweezers” approach, as opposed to the government’s general shutdown, or “hammer,” policy. READ MORE