The Likud secretariat on Tuesday afternoon approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision, announced overnight, to grant guaranteed spots on the party’s electoral list to Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Defense Minister Israel Katz ahead of the primary later this month.

Katz and Sa’ar will be given reserved placements separate from the eight slots set aside for candidates of Netanyahu’s choosing, the Likud announcement said, meaning that in total, 10 of the first 29 spaces on the ruling party’s slate will go to hand-picked candidates rather than to those elected by the party’s roughly 140,000 members at the upcoming August 17 primary.

However, following a ruling by an internal Likud court, the secretariat froze a vote on giving another guaranteed spot to Likud Central Committee chair Haim Katz, whom the tribunal noted is running in the party’s primary.

Guaranteeing Haim Katz’s spot now “might raise a claim of reliance on Katz’s part that, naturally, would cause him to stop his election campaign if the approval for the reservation becomes final,” despite what appear to be potentially legitimate arguments against the move, the party court wrote in its decision.

The court failed to rule on the petitioners’ demand that the spots given to Sa’ar and Israel Katz should come at the expense of the prime minister’s reservation quota while justifying giving the foreign minister a reserved spot because “this is not actually a reservation, but rather a joint run of two factions within one list of candidates” — a reference to the merger between Sa’ar’s New Hope party and Netanyahu’s Likud.

According to the Kan public broadcaster, Netanyahu on Tuesday also approved shortening the requirements for party membership to allow Ze’ev Elkin, a member........

© The Times of Israel