His pace, his themes, his campaign: unsurprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu devoured Israeli news, as the legislative elections on Monday March 2 approached. None of the Prime Minister's 70-year-old rivals have displayed comparable energy across the country. In February, it held up to two to three meetings a night, in front of a few hundred people, from the Israeli outskirts to the West Bank settlements.
This campaign has continued uninterrupted since December 2018, when Mr. Netanyahu broke his parliamentary majority to call early elections – he has since failed to find it. But in the past two months, his style has changed. He, who had spent the almost permanent live election on Facebook Live in September, favors the field like never before.
Calm and happy
He kept the press at bay: now he is increasing the number of interviews. He renounced the unprecedented violence with which he denounced "A coup d'etat of the judges", in November, the evening of his indictment in court for corruption, fraud and breach of trust. He does not mention, during a meeting, his trial, which will open on March 17, when negotiations between parties for the formation of a government will begin. His opposition will use it, but this is only a formal hearing: the trial should not really begin until May or June.
Mr. Netanyahu appears calm and happy. His party stopped warning voters of imminent defeat to convince them to go to the polls. Likud is now on the verge of reaching a majority. On Monday, he planned a huge effort to mobilize his voters one by one, even if it meant sending an activist outside their door, who would take them to the polling station.
Likud asks them to download an application to their phones again, a manufacturing defect that disclosed personal information to millions of Israelis in February. The party may have compromised the safety of officials in sensitive positions and members of intelligence agencies and the military, said former Mossad director Tamir Pardo.
At the end of January, Mr. Netanyahu embarked on a stunning international tour. In Washington, he had unveiled alongside President Trump the American plan for an Israeli-Palestinian "peace". The next day, he flew to Moscow to repatriate an Israeli woman convicted of drug possession and forgiven by Vladimir Putin. In Uganda, he had dialogued with Sudanese general Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane, announcing a "Standardization" relations with this former stronghold of opposition to Israel in the name of political Islam.
