To put it simply, was the shuk still with Bibi?
Shortly before Israel went into its third lockdown, the brightly lit alleyways thronged with Shabbos shoppers; spices, fruit, and halvah beckoned from carefully arranged stalls; and the merchants praised their merchandise with their usual ear-splitting gusto.
Apart from some shuttered stores and ubiquitous face masks, not much had changed from my last foray into the shuk to test the political waters. As in January 2019, Bibi was still in power, the left wing was churning out new parties, and Machaneh Yehudah was festooned with portraits of Menachem Begin.
But as Israel prepared for its fourth election in two years, there was one difference: Bibi had a challenger who couldn’t be so easily smeared as a leftist. Gideon Saar, a bona fide right-winger, had founded his own party and was polling at 20 seats — enough to deny Netanyahu a majority.
Who, I wondered, were Saar’s new voters? Polls showed Likud bleeding support because of Bibi’s handling of the pandemic. Some had Likud at 26 seats, down from 36 in March. Were the disaffected Likudniks only from the soft right, or had his core support started to ebb?
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