In a political climate where Israel’s left is relatively weak and the Likud’s major electoral competitor is the centrist Blue-and-White party, Benjamin Netanyahu found himself unable to form a government because he could not get one of the smaller right-wing parties to join his coalition—forcing a second round of elections in September. Such factional squabbles, argues Akiva Bigman, led to the defeat of the right in 1988, when hard-right splinter parties (none of which endured) broke from Yitzḥak Shamir’s Likud after he decided to form a national-unity government with Labor:
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More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politics, Likud, Oslo Accords, Yitzhak Shamir