The struggle for right-wing leadership is moving into a new phase starting this week.
• Interpretation
Struggle for leadership and charisma
Photo:
David Cohen / Flash 90, Joshua Yosef
So in the end it drains into a duel between Netanyahu and Bennett.
This tension has been building for a long time.
In many ways, he is natural, and authentic, and in the long run also more constructive than the rivalry that Saar developed with Netanyahu.
Saar's efforts to tear the Likud to pieces and lead a dramatic explosion in the national camp aroused much curiosity and satisfaction on the left, but squeezed antagonism from the right, then a yawn.
The gradual decline of "New Hope", as accurate as the polls are and as long as it lasts, shows how much of an onslaught, unintentionally, is no longer counted on the right as part of the right - except by its dwindling supporters.
What was true for Lieberman is starting to be true for Storm as well.
He may not be on the left, but he is no longer on the right, in the electoral sense.
Sometimes the psychology of guilt by association is accurate.
On the right one sees the sympathy for the storm on the left and draws conclusions.
Gideon no longer lives here.
Netanyahu to Bennett: "Commit to the government without Yair Lapid and without rotation"
This does not necessarily make Saar an irrelevant opponent, as Netanyahu called him, but it does make him an opponent outside the camp.
That cannot be said of Bennett.
Here things become interesting: the struggle for right-wing leadership is moving from this week to a new phase.
It really is a struggle for leadership and charisma.
Even among Netanyahu's supporters, they are beginning to understand that this is a different kind of rivalry.
This is not an assault, in the sense that Bennett challenges Netanyahu, without openly connecting, and out of empathy, to opponents on the left.
Without flattering the Herak-La-Bibi movement and echoing its message.
Without dismissing the Likud supporters with contempt and arrogance over their loyalty to Netanyahu.
Without alienating his traditional partners.
This is not just a "Libra language" tactic.
This is also wise intra-right conduct.
Bennett's message is: "I want to lead the right."
Saar's message was: "I want to change the right."
This is a huge psychopolitical difference.
No forces
One thing should be clear: these are not forces.
Netanyahu has a solid and solid support base that allows the Likud to function as a kind of Axis party.
A small Axis party, but one whose governmental legitimacy stems not only from formulas for calculating blocs, but from leadership charisma and broad popular legitimacy for its activities.
Bennett does not have that.
Even if there is a dire future scenario in which it could demand rotation, it will happen as a result of optimal utilization of a coalition constellation, and not as a result of a mass drift.
It may be legal, it is certainly possible in the political system, but it is far from being an authentic reflection of a broad public trust in its leadership.
It's just a real game of limited cards.
He, too, knows that if he gets to Balfour one way or another, it is not on the shoulders of the masses, but on clauses in a coalition agreement.
And if he does replace Netanyahu there - just like Lapid or Saar - we will witness an absurd political moment in which the man who leaves the prime minister's residence enjoys much more public support than the man who came in to replace him.
Bennett: "Hearing a promise from Netanyahu - similar to the fact that you click on Wise on 'I am not the driver'" // Photo: Besheva Conference
These are distant, faint and difficult-to-grasp scenarios that echo a Raviv-Druker philosophy in the form of: Which formula will succeed in putting in Balfour a figure that the voter did not want.
And perhaps it should be emphasized once and for all: it is easier to get a lot of people to say who they do not want, than to bring in masses who will say who they do want.
This is Netanyahu's big fortune, and Bennett does not yet have it.
But in many ways, Bennett is running the competition against Netanyahu inside the house, without outsourcing.
Without much help from the left-wing stand - which was indeed granted to him at one point, when he served as defense minister at the beginning of the corona crisis.
And see what a wonder - and what a lesson - he becomes a relevant opponent, certainly more than a storm, precisely when the left has transferred his chips to another candidate.
It is precisely in this moment, when the greater magic of it has expired in the commentators' columns and when the front-only-no-bibi mocks him - he begins to rise as the most serious figure in front of Netanyahu.
It may not be the leadership battle Bennett would have wanted, but he's much closer to an assault.
Okay, nothing to compare.
This is not the same league.
These are two groups of completely different orders of magnitude.
But they are from the same city.
So it starts to smell like a derby.