Addressing settlers in the West Bank on Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an impassioned plea against voting for any of the new right-wing parties that have sprung up in recent months.

Dispersing votes between a smattering of different upstart parties would leave them all short of the 3.25 percent support they need to enter the Knesset, he warned. And even if a party does get in, it will be at the expense of an ideological compatriot, he complained.

“Whoever doesn’t pass the electoral threshold wastes their votes. Whoever does pass will take down an existing party,” Netanyahu declared, in his second such appeal in as many days. “So there’s only one message for all of the new right-wing parties: Leave, or unite with the existing parties. If you care about the future of the State of Israel, that’s what you need to do.”

Among those named by Netanyahu as a potential spoiler was Ofer Winter, a controversial former IDF general who earlier that evening had launched the People of Israel party, promising to “do everything to establish as broad a right-wing government as possible, with as many Zionist partners as possible.”

Winter is something of a wildcard. He has declared that he and his colleagues are ”a clear, definitive part of the right-wing camp,” and has insisted that he would not support Netanyahu’s chief rival, Gadi Eisenkot, as prime minister. At the same time, Winter has harshly criticized Netanyahu’s leadership, maintaining that the public will not accept “everything remaining the same in the political sphere.”

On paper, Winter mostly directly threatens Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, drawing support from the same settlement-backing nationalist base, but without the baggage of having been at the helm on October 7, 2023, or having voted for Haredi efforts to avoid conscription.

As of this writing, there is little reliable opinion polling on how much backing Winter may pull, and from where.

A survey published by Walla on Wednesday, its first since April, gave Winter’s party six seats and had Smotrich falling below the electoral threshold. But another poll published the same day by Channel 13 with over 1,400 respondents, among the largest conducted yet this election cycle, had Winter failing to enter the Knesset, while Religious Zionism held steady at five seats.........

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