Polls opened Tuesday morning to elect a leader of the Likud party and a new Likud central committee.
The incumbent, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, is expected to win handily against his only -and repeat- challenger, nationalist Moshe Feiglin. Feiglin opposes Netanyahu’s commitment to the two-state solution. “They [Palestinians] don’t deserve a state, certainly not in land that God promised the Jews,” he said.
Approximately 130,000 Likud members are eligible to vote in polling stations across the country, which opened at 10 A.M. and will close at 10 P.M.
In the previous Likud primary in August 2007, Netanyahu beat Feiglin by 73.2% to 23.4%.
Although national elections are not scheduled until November 2013, there is speculation that Netanyahu called for Likud primaries to be moved up because he intends to secure his mandate for another term before the upcoming US presidential election.