Likud Figures Warn Netanyahu’s Primary Shake-Up Could Backfire

Veteran Likud MK David Bitan sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday over efforts to cancel the party’s primaries, calling it a “constitutional takeover” in an interview with 103FM. Bitan said the Likud’s identity is built on democracy and the connection between elected officials and party activists, and warned that changing the rules a month before primaries would not fit the party’s tradition.

“Netanyahu would of course like to be like the other parties, it tickles him, so to speak, but it does not suit Likud,” Bitan said. He added that Netanyahu entered the party through a democratic process and argued that without primaries the party could lose its vitality within two or three months after an election. “You cannot keep a party on a non-democratic basis,” he said.

A day earlier, Netivot Mayor Yechiel Zohar, one of the powerful figures in Likud, also protested the plan in an interview with Walla. He said primaries are “not a technical tool” but “the beating heart” of Likud, and the only mechanism that ensures proper representation for districts, women, the periphery and broader sectors of Israeli society that see Likud as their political home.

Zohar warned that scrapping the primaries would badly damage grassroots activists’ motivation on election day. He said he supports specific reserved slots on the party list, but only as a supplement, not a replacement, for open primaries. In his view, the party’s strength comes from “the people’s choice” and not from closed-door lists.