Feiglin: I May Drop Out for Gov’t Post

Will he or won’t he? After declaring just a day earlier that he was in the election race to stay, Zehut Party head Moshe Feiglin said Wednesday that he could quit the race, after all. Speaking to Army Radio after meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Feiglin said that during the meeting “an opportunity has come about that will ensure that sick people who need medical cannabis will be able to get it.”

Feiglin said that he and Netanyahu “are moving towards an agreement in which I will give up my campaign in exchange for a government post after the elections, with an emphasis on opening up the cannabis market. We have an opportunity to turn something that had appeared to be a failure into a success.”

Political analysts said that it was quite noteworthy that Feiglin and Netanyahu would even be meeting, given the bad blood between them. Netanyahu engineered a “dump” of Feiglin from the Likud in the 2015 elections, driving him down the Likud list to an “unrealistic” slot, which led to Feiglin forming his own party for the April elections. Zehut is set to run in next month’s elections as well, but the party is said to be deep in debt and has so far been unable to run any ads or display any billboards.

Netanyahu is said to have initiated the contacts with Feiglin, imploring him to drop out of the elections over concern that votes for him would be “wasted” if, as polls indicate, he will not pass the electoral threshold. Feiglin last week denied that any pressure to quit was being applied to him, and that “Zehut is organizing to run a full-steam election campaign.” He repeated those sentiments on Tuesday, when he said that he had no plans to drop out of the elections, regardless of reports of “offers” by the Likud that he do so.