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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Election fever grips Israel as Netanyahu maneuver expected |
| 2012-01-29 |
| Israel's current coalition government is one of its most stable in decades, and the next scheduled national poll is nearly two years off. Yet election fever has gripped the country and some believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is quietly preparing to call for an early vote, perhaps in the middle of this year. The two biggest political parties - Netanyahu's conservative Likud and its main rival, the centrist Kadima - recently announced that they would hold primaries to select leaders whose names would be on the next election ballot. The left-leaning Labor Party held a leadership convention in September. And this month, popular TV news anchor Yair Lapid promised to shake up the status quo, saying he would compete for prime minister as head of a new party. In a country where the prime minister's average term in recent decades has been shorter than three years and most governments collapse prematurely, some believe that Netanyahu, who took office in 2009, will seek to capitalize on his improving popularity by securing another term before the U.S. presidential election in November. Netanyahu and President Barack Obama have had several high-profile clashes over Israel's continued settlement construction on land it seized during the 1967 Middle East War. In recent months, the White House has scaled back pressure, probably out of concern that such moves might anger Jewish and evangelical Christian voters in the United States and provide Obama's Republican challengers with ammunition. |
| Posted by:tipper |