About a month before this year's second round of elections, senior leaders of the Blue and White party made a point of announcing from every possible platform that they were certain that a mutiny in the Likud was only a matter of time, and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be removed as chairman of the Likud immediately after the election, with someone else taking over for him. The impetus behind this idea was the Blue and White party’s No. 2 candidate, Yair Lapid. His notion sounded convincing enough to create political and media buzz.
“The mutiny in the Likud has already begun,” Lapid said resolutely in an interview with the Walla News website in the first week of August. He supported his remarks with insider information, saying, “Senior Likud officials have been talking to me about it by phone. … We know the truth. The mutiny in the Likud has already begun. … They will not go to a third round of elections just because Netanyahu wants immunity from the indictments facing him. If there is a deadlock, we will have the good sense to form a unity government made up of the Blue and White party without Netanyahu but with [Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor] Liberman.”
Lapid’s insistence on this wasn’t some kind of spin. He was voicing a conclusion based on various political and legal assessments, which claimed that Netanyahu would be unable to withstand either the indictments or a political and media tsunami depicting him as the only obstacle blocking the creation of a unity government.
Anyone looking for further evidence of this could find it in remarks made by Liberman just before the Sept. 12 election. “If he [Netanyahu] fails to garner 61 people to recommend the Likud, he will be replaced that very evening,” Liberman predicted. Liberman, a former Likud member himself, insinuated that he has reason to believe that Netanyahu’s days in the Likud would be nearing their end if the prime minister failed to deliver the goods. The close relationship between Liberman and Lapid fed the sense that a mutiny in the Likud was right around the corner. And yet, so far, that mutiny has failed to break out.
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