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Jerusalem, July 28 - Party leaders, campaign consultants, and aspiring legislators continued this week to prepare for parliamentary elections later this year, with some of the largest parties settling on the one message they must convey to voters, but one that they fear might not resonate with the electorate in a way that generates inspiration, a shared sense of purpose, or a compelling reason to vote for them in particular: just don't vote Binyamin Netanyahu back into the premiership.
The Knesset voted to disperse last month, triggering new elections scheduled for November 1. That contest brings back to prominence many of the phenomena that characterized the other four contests in the last five years. Chief among those phenomena, political rivals of Netanyahu failing to develop positive platforms of their own, to the point that the essence of several different parties' campaign messages have focused in the main on bringing down the man who has dominated Israeli politics for thirteen years, and not on any vision for Israel's future that differentiates each party from any other.
Polls show a familiar deadlock between the "will sit in a government under Bibi" and "will not sit in a government under Bibi" factions, neither of which can muster a parliamentary majority of 61 seats that allows a coalition to form. That stalemate prevailed through several previous contests after the last coalition under Netanyahu collapsed, but until last year when anti-Netanyahu factions cobbled together a diverse coalition just big enough, none could form a government to displace him. Mixed results from the current Bennett-Lapid government and associated political machinations reasserted the fractured and fractious nature of the polity the government purported to represent, restoring the status quo ante of Bibi vs. anti-Bibi factions not broad enough to secure governance, and neither faction with enough coherent positive vision that voters rally to them in sufficient numbers.
"In a word, inertia," explained one analyst. "Netanyahu sat at the top for so long that he entrenched himself in enough minds as the status quo, and others must convince voters of any necessity to change. Enough elected officials convinced themselves last time around that they had done so, and formed a Bibi-less coalition. But the folly of that effort has now become evident, and the anti-Netanyahu faction has also readopted the status quo ante: making everything about Bibi Bibi Bibi and refusing to articulate a word about what their parties actually stand for."
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