In the wake of weeks of internal competition over the leadership of the “Change Camp” and the identity of the largest party, the camp’s leaders are heading towards a new phase of the electoral campaign based on organizing polarization and avoiding dual competition, through a thoughtful distribution of the target audience with the aim of withdrawing votes from the right-wing camp.
The camp leaders are scheduled to meet, on Saturday evening, at the home of opposition leader Yair Lapid in Tel Aviv, in the presence of Naftali Bennett, Gadi Eisenkot, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan. This meeting comes in light of the crystallization of preliminary understandings aimed at moving the campaign towards a strategy of attracting voters from outside the camp, after a solitary meeting earlier this week between Eisenkot and Lieberman, during which they agreed to expand the size of the camp and stop mutual attacks.
According to the current trends revealed in a report by journalist Anna Barsky in the Israeli newspaper “Maariv”, each party within the camp seeks to focus on specific segments that it has a greater chance of attracting, even though the boundaries of those “electoral areas” have not yet been finally decided and have not turned into a binding agreement, at a time when campaign crews continue to conduct coordination communications.
The “Yisrael Beytenu” party directs its focus mainly towards the liberal, ideological and secular right, targeting angry Likud voters who do not belong to the solid base supporting Benjamin Netanyahu or the religious crowd, in addition to voters who are currently heading towards the “Amcha Yisrael” party led by Ofer Venter. In this effort, the party is relying on its candidates such as Rafi Ben Shitrit and Sharon Sharaabi, in addition to its efforts to restore and expand its base among immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union who vote for Likud. Sources in the party were quoted as saying: “We know in which cities, neighborhoods and ballot boxes Likud received the largest number of votes, and we are working in a focused manner.”
For its part, the “Yashar!” party, led by Gadi Eisenkot, targets a wide segment that includes traditional voters, those dissatisfied with “Likud” and the “Shas” party, and voters who are indecisive about their choices, in addition to the moderate nationalist religious public. On the other hand, it is estimated that the primary focus of both Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid is on liberal voters who are fed up with Netanyahu, in isolation from voters of the ideological right or the religious public.
It is expected that the distribution of the target audience and overcoming the state of competition for the voters themselves will constitute the most prominent issue on the table of Saturday’s meeting, marking the entry of the electoral campaign for the Change camp into a more organized phase, in which the battle will transform from an internal struggle for the lead to a coordinated effort to extract votes from the right-wing camp.
