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Until now, the negotiations have reportedly revolved around two main issues. The first is the restoration of diplomatic relations between both countries. Bilateral ties were cut off in 2016 when Saudi Arabia executed Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a Saudi dissident who was a Shia cleric, and protesters in Tehran stormed the Saudi Embassy in retaliation. The second topic of discussion is the Yemen War, which entered a new phase with the 2015 Saudi-led intervention against Houthi rebels who had taken over the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.

For more than one year, the Saudis have been looking for a way out of Yemen. The enormous economic costs of the conflict became more when oil prices fell as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns.

Even after the recovery of the hydrocarbon market, the fact remains that six years of war have not brought Saudi Arabia any closer to its two major goals in Yemen: reestablishing Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi as president and constraining the Houthis’ influence. Furthermore, US President Joe Biden, while not as tough on the kingdom as promised in his election campaign, has been less with Saudi Arabia than his predecessor, Donald Trump.

Who Are the Houthis?

The Saudis often present the Houthis as little more than Iranian puppets. Iran’s official is that the Houthi movement only receives ideological support from Tehran. Both narratives are inaccurate, to say the least.

The Houthis are a homegrown movement that successfully the Yemeni government’s military offensives from 2004 to 2010 without any external assistance. Hussein al-Houthi, the movement’s early leader and from whom its name is derived, was an of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and was influenced by its symbolism and ideology. His brother and current leader of the movement, Abdel-Malek al-Houthi, has also his admiration for the Islamic Republic.

The first credible of Iranian military support for the Houthis date back to 2013. Until 2016, weapons transfers were largely restricted to light arsenal. In the following years, Tehran started to supply the Houthis with increasingly sophisticated missile and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) components. Furthermore, a contingent of Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the ground has been Houthi fighters. The Yemeni movement’s capacity to key strategical interests within Saudi Arabia, such as oil extraction facilities, pipelines and airports, cannot be understood without accounting for Iran’s role in the conflict.

At the same time, and contrary to Saudi claims, the Houthis are largely independent from Iran. Their territorial expansion in 2014 was politically built on its Faustian bargain with the former Yemeni president and arch-rival, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the unpopularity of the Hadi government, which was backed by Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, most of the Houthis’ current arsenal has not been sourced from Iran. It has rather been acquired in the local — which is well-connected to the Horn of Africa’s smuggling routes — in battle or as a result of the of governmental military units to the Houthis. Before the war began, Yemen was already a country with small weaponry, coming only to the US in terms of weapons per capita.

According to the official Saudi narrative, the Houthis necessitate Iranian help to maintain their military effort. While this is most likely the case when it comes to the group’s capability to strike targets within Saudi territory, an abrupt end of Iranian military assistance to the Houthis would make little difference in Yemen’s internal balance of power.

What Saudi Arabia and Iran Need to Do

Saudi Arabia needs to come to terms with the fact that its attempt to impose a military solution in Yemen has failed. It has done so because of counterproductive airstrikes, support for unpopular local actors and a misunderstanding of internal dynamics. If Yemen has become Saudi Arabia’s quagmire, this has little to do with Iran’s limited support for the Houthis.

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Iran, for its part, should understand that its claims of non-interference in the Yemen War have gained a farcical nature over the years, as growing evidence has piled up on Iranian–Houthi ties. Iranian leaders cannot impose on the Houthis an end to attacks against Saudi territory. However, they can decisively constrain them by stopping the flow of UAV and missile technology to the Houthis, as well as ending their military training on the ground. In conjunction with this, Iran can support the direct Houthi–Saudi talks that began in late 2019.

For Saudi–Iranian negotiations to bear fruits in relation to the Yemen conflict, both sides need to show a realistic appraisal of Iran’s role in the war. It comes down to acknowledging two key facts. On the one hand, Iran has leverage over the Houthis because of its military support for the group. On the other hand, this leverage is inherently limited and cannot be used to grant Saudi Arabia a military victory in Yemen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Will Saudi-Iran Talks Lead to Anything? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

The lack of a common European position on Yemen could be observed after September 14, 2019, when Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia were hit by airstrikes, forcing the kingdom to cut its oil production by more than a half. The attacks by the Houthi rebels who had seized the capital Sanaa in 2014.

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Although the Houthis had hit Saudi territory several times in the past, Riyadh that the Aramco attacks were launched from the north, implicitly blaming either Iran or Iraqi militias backed by Tehran. Iran provides the Houthis with support, although claims that the group is an Iranian proxy are . An investigation carried out on behalf of the United Nations Security Council that the attacks had probably not been launched from Yemen.

On the one hand, and reacted to the attacks (whose authorship was even more uncertain at that moment) with very similar statements, highlighting their commitment to support the security of Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the German Foreign Ministry and the European External Action Service (the diplomatic arm of the EU) emphasized the need for de-escalation and made no reference to Saudi security.

The Embargo That Never Was

The different wording of these statements following the Aramco attacks could be considered anecdotic if it did not reflect a more profound divergence of views among EU members regarding the conflict in Yemen. France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain have continued to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia despite its of international humanitarian law and human rights in Yemen. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, direct targeting by the Saudi-led coalition has resulted in more than since 2015.

Germany is the only EU heavyweight that has to Saudi Arabia, even though Berlin has the export of €400 million ($449 million) in weapons to Saudi Arabia in March last year. Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are some of the countries that have taken a . It must be noted, however, that the economic value of weapons sales to Riyadh differs greatly from country to country. Saudi Arabia Britain’s biggest market for weapons exports and the third-largest for France. On the contrary, none of the above-mentioned countries implementing a ban has Saudi Arabia among its top-three buyers of military equipment.

An EU-wide ban on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia is not only extremely unlikely, it would also have a limited impact if implemented. The United States remains by far the major arms supplier to Saudi Arabia, providing the kingdom has bought since 2014. Even so, an EU-wide ban on weapons sales to Riyadh is one of the strongest policies the EU could enforce. The share of Saudi weapons imports originating from EU countries is not the of its importance for Riyadh. Switching from one weapons supplier to another takes money, time and may lead to incompatibilities in the weapons systems.

EU countries exporting weapons to Saudi Arabia are acting against the approved in 2008. Article 2 of the Common Position establishes that EU member states must deny an export license for military technology that “might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law.” Adding to this, the EU’s former foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, strongly against military solutions for Yemen. Mogherini’s successor, Josep Borrell, has less credibility to take such a position since he was Spain’s foreign minister when the Socialist government its initial ban on weapon sales to Saudi Arabia.

At the end, however, national EU governments retain sovereignty in the management of arms exports and thus often contradict the EU Common Policy. The European Parliament has called for a to be implemented in order to monitor weapons sales, but the decision is non-binding. Actually, it is to see members of the European Parliament voting in favor of severing support to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen while their own parties implement a diametrically opposite policy at the national level.

The Rhetoric-Reality Gap

This notwithstanding, it would be a mistake to think that the European Union has not been able to formulate a coordinated and coherent strategy regarding Yemen only because of the dissimilar positions of its member states regarding weapons exports. The low priority given to formulating and eventually supporting such a policy has been equally important. The volume of aid Yemen has received from the European Union is proof of its limited importance to EU leaders.

Between 2015 and 2018 — the last year for which reliable data is available — Yemen has been €2.33 billion in aid from EU institutions and member countries. During these same four years, Afghanistan and Morocco have received more than €5 billion each from the European Union, the largest global contributor of humanitarian aid.

It is true that the effective delivery of humanitarian assistance is always complicated when a country is involved in a civil war, and Yemen is no exception. Actually, there are reasons to fear the Houthis might be diverting aid to non-humanitarian purposes. However, it would be naĂŻve to assume that this is the main reason for the low levels of humanitarian aid Yemen has received from the European Union and its member countries. With a slightly smaller population, war-ravaged Syria has received three times as much humanitarian aid as Yemen between 2015 and 2018.

The explanation for this reality has more to do with the fact that the war in Yemen does not carry the threat of a refugee crisis for the European Union. As surprising as it may seem, more than 160,000 migrants, mostly from Ethiopia and Somalia, in Yemen in 2018. Once there, they often join Yemenis in trying to reach Saudi Arabia in the search of a better life. Riyadh, however, exerts strict controls on migration on the Saudi-Yemeni border, having built a fence along it during the early 2000s.

Marissa Quie and Hameed Hakimi that in the European Union, aid has become “a tool to stem what electorates perceive to be a ‘tidal wave’ of migration.” This goes a long way into explaining why Libya — through an Italy-Libya deal supported by the EU — Morocco, Turkey or Afghanistan, important points of rigin or transit for migrants aiming to reach Europe, are seen as a higher priority than Yemen.

The incapacity of the European Union to reach and implement a comprehensive strategy regarding Yemen damages its soft-power projection in the world. Even though the EU stance on the Yemeni conflict is only one of many aspects leading to the questioning of Europe’s soft power, it does not always have to be this way. Europe proved this with its constructive role in the negotiation of the Iran nuclear deal, regardless of the fact that the EU was far less successful in finding a solution to the US exit from the deal in 2018.

The European Union rhetorically upholds a certain set of norms that are presumably the result of a certain European identity. These include the defense of human rights, the respect of international regimes — the 2008 EU Common Position and the 2014 Arms Trade Treaty among them — and the responsibility to help avert humanitarian crisis through aid. Nevertheless, as Mai’a K. Davis Cross , “identity, image, policies and Public Diplomacy are all interrelated.” EU public diplomacy in Yemen cannot work as long as its policies, and those of its member states, convey an image at odds with the identity the European Union claims as its own.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post For Yemen, No Consistent EU Policy in Sight appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

When in 2015 Saudi Arabia decided to intervene more directly in the conflict raging beyond its southern border, the Houthis had already taken control of the main urban center in the south of the country, the port of Aden. However, they were soon forced to retreat from the city.

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Nevertheless, five years later, the Houthis still control large swaths of territory in the west of Yemen, where most of the population lives. The Houthi siege of Taiz in the southwest has , and in recent months the rebels have advanced in al-Jawf, a province northeast of Yemen’s capital Sanaa, and moved closer to control Marib province. Marib is not only oil-rich, but is also the stronghold of the internationally recognized government of exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Saudi Failure

After five years of conflict, the humanitarian situation in the country can only be defined as catastrophic. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, more than 112,000 people have been in the war, including 12,600 civilians. While the Houthis are responsible for a fair share of the atrocities committed in Yemen, most of the civilian deaths can be attributed to indiscriminate bombing by the Saudi-led coalition. Already in 2018, the UN warned that Yemen was on the brink of facing the “world’s worst famine in 100 years.”

Critical as the situation in Yemen had been in the tumultuous years following the downfall of long-time ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh in the wake of the Arab Spring, the Saudi-led intervention in 2015 complicated matters even further. The Saudi and Emirati engagement in the war added a new layer of complexity to a conflict in which intra-Muslim division, regional identities, competition for scarce resources, and tribal rivalry were prominent factors. Iran’s assistance to the Houthis is certainly , and describing the conflict in Yemen as a proxy war between regional rivals would be far-fetched. However, Iran’s role in the conflict has raised the stakes for Saudi Arabia.

When we confront the stated objectives of the Saudi-led coalition in launching Operation Decisive Storm with the situation on the ground five years later, it is evident that the offensive was everything but decisive, at least not in the intended sense. We may leave aside all the claims about the Yemeni population and restoring Hadi’s legitimate government. The high number of civilian casualties caused by the coalition’s airstrikes proved the hypocrisy of the first claim, while the increasing subordination of President Hadi to Riyadh’s whims eroded even further his legitimacy within Yemen.

Even though the intervention in Yemen was inadequately planned, the rationale behind Decisive Storm had clearly much to do with two major concerns. On the one hand was the fear of Iran-aligned Houthis establishing a permanent presence in the strategic entrance to the Red Sea. On the other hand lay addressing the threat represented by the rebels’ capacity to carry out strikes in southern Saudi Arabia. Five years after the operation’s inception, the Houthis control the northern section of Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, and their drone attacks have grown in sophistication. The September 2019 on two major Saudi oil facilities was probably not carried out by the rebels in northern Yemen. However, the Houthis are reported to be using drone models. As the attacks have grown bolder, they have proven able to — although with little accuracy — the Saudi capital, Riyadh. 

Quagmire

Yemen has become a quagmire for Saudi Arabia. This description appears quite illustrative, since the more Riyadh has engaged in Yemen military, the further it has found itself from achieving its vaguely-defined objectives. It is easier to start a war than to find a way out of one, and the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, is learning the lesson the hard way. This is especially true because the in his hands in recent years makes it very difficult for bin Salman to spread the blame for the failing campaign in Yemen.

History could have taught the crown prince in advance that neither he nor his kingdom were unlikely to emerge in a stronger position after intense military engagement in Yemen. As thoroughly examined by the work of the scholar , the 1962-68 Yemen Civil War that put an end to the theocratic institution of the imamate in northern Yemen showed the rather limited advantages of foreign military superiority in the highlands north of Sanaa. The troops and planes sent by Egypt’s president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, had a hard time in trying to uproot tribal fighters supporting the last imam from the caves where they hid.

Airstrikes and chemical attacks were not enough to implement the revolutionary project Nasser envisioned for Yemen. In fact, the new Yemen Arab Republic, consolidated after the end of the civil war, was essentially the result of a compromise between the Yemeni pro-Nasserites and the monarchists who had been battling each other.

Whereas nowadays the Houthis control a territory that goes far beyond their mountainous stronghold in Sadah, in the event of serious military defeats in other areas — something that seems unlikely in the short run — they could always retreat to the north, where geography plays into their asymmetric warfare strategy and the population is more supportive of the rebel group. This would definitely prevent the Saudis from imposing a conclusive end to the war.

A Cynical Excuse

There are solid reasons to argue that the Saudi leadership has by now realized it cannot emerge from Yemen victorious. The of Emirati troops from southern Yemen at the end of last year, along with the infighting between southern separatists and troops loyal to President Hadi that had previously focused on fighting the Houthis, weakened Saudi Arabia’s position. A in US Congress in April 2019 to end support for the Yemen War is also a factor to be taken into account. While US President Donald Trump has stopped the resolution from having an effect so far, it might signal a more restrained future US engagement with Riyadh if Trump is not reelected later this year.

Saudi Arabia and the Houthis engaged in back-channel talks in late 2019, making a compromise in the near future a real possibility. The ceasefire announced by the Saudi-led coalition last week has been , but incentives remain for the warring parties to engage in de-escalation. Saudi Arabia has been spending at least since the beginning of the conflict in Yemen — an amount it can hardly afford considering the dramatic amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Houthis, who are on the military offensive around Marib, could soon have a stronger position to negotiate from. However, the rebel group has often needed to resort to to impose its rule in the areas it controls. Rising prices, corruption and political repression have contributed to the Houthis’ inability to win the hearts and minds of a considerable part of the Yemeni population. Arguing that the Houthis have imposed new restrictions on the international delivery of aid to the areas under their control, the US is planning to cut the majority of . The Houthis badly need this aid in order to maintain the uneasy calm in the rebel-held regions.

The situation could further deteriorate if COVID-19 spreads after the was reported days ago. The recent ceasefire announced by Riyadh has in fact been as a response to UN calls for a cessation of hostilities in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. After bombing Yemeni civilians for years, Saudi leaders may use COVID-19 as a cynical excuse to pave the way for a progressive exit from Yemen. If Yemen is ever to go back to a semblance of peace, it is necessary, but not sufficient, for Saudi Arabia to realize that it cannot emerge victorious from this quagmire.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Is Saudi Arabia Looking for an Exit from Yemen? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

The results of the appear to be quite clear as of now —  at least when it comes to the actual numbers emerging from the polling stations. What is far more open to debate is the interpretation of what happened on March 31. We are used to seeing how, around the world, different political parties read the same electoral results in opposite ways. However, the outcome of the Turkish local elections offers a more interesting case than other contradicting statements. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has received “a strong warning,” . And so it did. that the AKP has showed considerable strength. They are right too.

Although it will take time for the dust to settle after the close electoral races for Istanbul and Ankara, both cities will in all likelihood end up in the hands of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). The center-left nationalist CHP, the main opposition party, has obtained two significant victories after unending defeats. Turkey’s two most populous cities, which combine around a quarter of the country’s population, appear to have been lost by the conservative Islamist AKP; the party of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had controlled both the economic and political capitals of the country since 2004.

What is more, Islamist mayors have been at the helm of Istanbul and Ankara for more than two decades. It was Erdoğan himself who won the Istanbul mayorship in 1994, which catapulted him to the very center of Turkish politics.

The AKP has announced that it will challenge the results of the elections in and . Nevertheless, the possibility of the supreme electoral board overturning the CHP’s wins appears to be very remote. This is especially true in the case of Ankara, where there was a 4% gap (around 150,000 votes) between AKP’s candidate Mehmet Özhaseki and CHP’s Mansur YavaƟ. Most probably, the decisive challenge for the CHP will not arise from the AKP’s petitions for a recount. It will come from the pressing need to deliver, and soon, on its electoral promises to the populations of Istanbul and Ankara. The ability to do so will be essential for the CHP to have a chance to unseat the AKP in the 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections.

The major setback for the ruling AKP in these local elections is represented by the loss of the crown jewels of Istanbul and Ankara. The results in the city on the Bosporus are particularly hurtful. The provisional results gave a 2% margin to the AKP’s Binali Yıldırım, the former speaker of the grand national assembly, over the CHP’s Ekrem Imamoğlu after more than half the votes have been counted. The slower counting process in some Istanbul districts that constitute CHP’s strongholds (such as Kadiköy and BeƟiktaƟ) had much to do with this.

Was It the Economy?

Erdoğan came to power in 2002 after the AKP received 34% of the votes in the general election. Since then, a succession of local, parliamentary and presidential elections has taken place. On all of these occasions but one, the AKP has been above the 40% mark and below the 50%. The exception was the 2009 local elections, when Turkey was suffering the consequences of the global financial crisis. As a matter of fact, in 2009 the from $764.336 billion to $644.640 billion. In that year’s local elections, the AKP received 38% of the vote.

In the run-up to Sunday’s election, a decade on, the was equally problematic. The country is struggling with recession, inflation and the depreciation of the national currency, the Turkish lira. This reality deeply affected the electoral campaign. The AKP and its ally in the last general and this local election, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the March 31 polls as a “struggle for national survival.”

What was at stake, the narrative went on, was the success of the fight against domestic and international terrorism. Whereas this kind of discourse was partly motivated by the desire to shift the focus away from economic problems, achieving such a feat was simply impossible. The coalition between the CHP and the Good Party (IYI Party), which reached an agreement to present only one candidate in many provinces, the responsibility of the government for the current economic crisis.

The government by arguing that Turkish citizens have seen conditions improve greatly since the AKP arrived to power in 2002. Moreover, President that Western countries, and more specifically the US, have been working to undermine the Turkish economy. It is difficult to believe in such an elaborated conspiracy scheme. A more likely explanation is that America’s confrontational stance toward Turkey (especially the on Turkish exports) and financial speculation on foreign exchange markets have taken their toll on the Turkish economy.

The national economic structure has not proved to be resilient enough to pass such a difficult test, and the is suffering the consequences. This notwithstanding, this social group, which constitutes the backbone of the AKP’s electoral base, has not deserted the party. In fact, it seems to have given a vote of confidence to the president — proof that they believe in the ruling party to get Turkey out of economic difficulty. The overall vote for AKP candidates has moved from parliamentary elections and the 2014 local elections to around.

The Road to the Palace

The AKP’s problem has been its inability to maximize the impact of its votes. This is the conclusion we can reach if we have a look at some of the results in Turkey’s metropolitan municipalities, which represent the highest form of administrative organization in the 30 most populous of the country’s 81 provinces. If we observe the results in some metropolitan municipalities where AKP victory was taken for granted due to its regional strength (places like Konya, Trabzon, Malatya or Erzurum), a certain picture emerges.

This time, the AKP has received a significantly larger share of the total vote than in 2014. In Konya, for instance, the increase represents a 6% of the vote. This growth in popular support can probably be explained by an important element: The MHP did not put forward candidates in the above-mentioned provinces after reaching an agreement with the ruling party. Thus, many MHP voters are likely to have moved to the AKP in these areas.

This helps understand why the AKP’s overall vote has increased despite the fact that now it just 39 provinces, while it held 48 after the 2014 local elections. At the same time, the CHP has moved from ruling 14 provinces to 21. An important factor leading to this new reality is that the the eight close contests for a metropolitan municipality in which it was involved. If we define a close race as a struggle to control a municipality where the difference between the winner and the runner-up in 2014 was below a 10% margin, going into Sunday’s vote 11 out of the 30 metropolitan municipalities presented such a case. In five of these, the CHP was able to defeat the incumbent.

If the presidential and parliamentary votes are not moved forward, there will be no more elections in Turkey until 2023. This means that drawing any definitive conclusion on how the local elections might translate into the coming polls would be premature. However, by now it seems that only a joint effort by the IYI Party and the CHP in the presidential election has a chance of defeating the AKP.

The road to the presidential palace in Ankara goes through a repetition of the winning formula in Istanbul and the capital. The CHP and the IYI Party should also take into account that had the HDP presented a candidate in Istanbul, Yıldırım would now be mayor. The pro-Kurdish and leftist HDP paved the way for Ä°mamoğlu’s win.

The health of the alliance between the AKP and the MHP also appears to be decisive for the near future. The implementation of tough and unpopular economic measures by the government seems to be around the corner. This can test the strength of the AKP-MHP duo. The Economy Ministry used a considerable amount of central bank reserves to before the election in March. This is not sustainable in the long run. While the AKP’s electoral base has been loyal to the party this time, there is no certainty this will happen again in the future.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post What Does Turkey’s Election Result Mean for Its Ruling Party? appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.

On February 28, Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced his decision to , who is facing investigations in three different cases and could be found guilty of . Prior to Mandelblit’s announcement, there was a that the indictment would affect the electoral prospects of his party, Likud, in the general election that will take place on April 9. A published by The Times of Israel had found that Likud could drop from 29 to 25 projected seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Moreover, over a quarter of those who initially planned to vote for Likud said they would desert the party in case of an indictment.

However, while Netanyahu’s prosecution has moved to the next stage, the expected consequences have not materialized. The electoral polls published after February 28 any change in the volume of public support toward the embattled prime minister. The average of the different polls published in February prior to the indictment showed that Likud would gain around 30 seats. Since Mandelblit’s decision, polls forecast that Likud will control 29 out of the 120 seats in the Knesset.

It is also relevant to observe the case of the New Right, a recently created party headed by Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennet, which would be a likely destination for disenchanted Likud voters. Nevertheless, the New Right has experienced a small fall in the polls since Mandelblit presented charges against Netanyahu. The Blue and White coalition, of Benny Gantz’s Resilience Party and Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, continues to lead all the electoral polls. The coalition’s leaders that in the case of Netanyahu’s victory, the prime minister would immediately pass legislation to secure his immunity from prosecution, but the message does not seem to have had a desired impact as support for Netanyahu has not declined.

THE LIMITATIONS OF ELECTORAL POLLING 

Electoral polls, however, should be taken with a pinch of salt. Rob Santos, president of the American Statistical Association, that pollsters rely on the adage that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. This means that an important change in the political panorama between two elections will introduce new elements of uncertainty in the pollsters’ already difficult job.

When the Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu coalition contested the 2013 election, the were considerably below what most polls had predicted — and far below the combined total of 42 seats the two parties had prior to the elections. The prospective performance of the electoral Blue and White coalition seems even more difficult to predict than that of Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu if we take into account that the was created as recently as December 2018.

Electoral coalitions do not always maximize votes. This might not be a great problem in plurality or majoritarian electoral systems. On the contrary, it is highly problematic when a country has a very proportional electoral system with a low threshold. Israel is the paradigmatic example of this system. Sona Nadenichek Golder, professor of political science at the Pennsylvania State University,  that Israel has seen “a number of successful pre-electoral coalitions.”

So far, Blue and White is than the combination of Resilience Party and Yesh Atid before the merger. However, looking back at history, Golder notes that “pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form and be successful in countries that have a disproportional electoral system.” Dahlia Scheindlin, a leading international public opinion analyst, reading election polls by focusing “on trends, range, and averages.” If we consider the average of Likud and Blue and White in the electoral polls, a clear picture emerges. The Likud is around four seats behind Blue and White, and the trend is stable. Such a distance is clearly within the margin of error.

The fact that Likud is organized around the has not acted against the party after the indictment. In fact, one does not need to believe that Netanyahu is being unjustly accused in order to vote for him. All it takes is to be convinced that, despite Netanyahu’s criminal activities, the current prime minister remains the best option for Israel. According to a , after Netanyahu’s indictment only 10% of Likud voters opined that the probes against him are “extremely serious and should not be taken lightly.”

After all, Israel is a country built on the occupation of Palestinian lands, especially since the 1967 Six-Day War. Furthermore, Likud voters are especially hawkish regarding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Thus, it should not be so surprising that they believe in the Machiavellian principle that the end justifies the means. If Netanyahu , they may think, it was because the media was being unfair to him and jeopardizing his work in the pursuit of the public good.

SHY LIKUDISM

There is also the undeniable possibility of a presence of “shy Likudism.” The original term, “,” gained prominence in the 1990s and refers to the theory that a part of the British conservative voters does not want to openly admit its political preferences. When confronted by pollsters, they sometimes prefer not to answer. On other occasions, they mislead pollsters by saying they will vote a party other than the Conservatives. There is good reason to argue that some prospective Likud voters could be behaving in a similar way. Polls ahead of the 2015 election the public support enjoyed by the party.

This time, the stigma of corruption surrounding Netanyahu could lead even more Likud supporters to hide their electoral preferences. This may have had an impact on the polls conducted before the attorney general’s announcement and after it. There are two reasons for this. First, Mandelblit’s decision was, at least to a certain extent, . Second, strong rumors about Netanyahu’s corruption have circulated for a long time.

While cross-country comparisons have a limited value, the case of the 2015 Spanish elections is noteworthy. The conservative Popular Party (PP), which had been in government since 2011 and was enmeshed in , was forecast to garner around 25% of the votes. In the end, PP won almost 29%.

It is not far-fetched to argue that Likud and Blue and White are neck-to-neck ahead of the coming elections. In fact, Likud could easily be ahead in the electoral race. However, we should not forget the specifics of the Israeli parliamentary system. It is not enough for a party to garner plurality among the voters. The party will also need to receive the support of a majority of the Knesset to form a government. Netanyahu himself became prime minister in 2009 despite Tzipi Livni’s the most votes.

Thus, the electoral performance of the former government partners of Likud such as Shas and United Torah Judaism will prove decisive. All in all, as journalist Ben Caspit intelligently , “it is unclear whether the outcome of the April 9 elections will resolve Israel’s current political predicament and permit the formation of a new government.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔčÏ’s editorial policy.

The post Netanyahu’s Indictment Doesn’t Mean He Won’t Win appeared first on 51łÔčÏ.