Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak was interviewed on Radio 103FM on Monday and claimed that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would try to run for president in order to evade his trial.
On the issue of possible elections, Barak said, "Neither Bibi nor Gantz want elections in March but they could reach that point against their will."
"I think Netanyahu will prefer elections in June, because there is a chance that the election campaign will take place when he has vaccines, he has more space, he can raise the issue of the presidency or see if it is possible to make an inappropriate deal with Benny Gantz," he claimed.
Barak asserted that Netanyahu will try to run for president because, he claimed, "Netanyahu is not dealing with either the coronavirus or the economic crisis, this is only the worst failure since the establishment of the state. We have 2.5 times more victims than the Second Intifada, and we are a country with nothing. There is no budget in it. Netanyahu understands that he is going nowhere, and his priority will be anything that will get him out of a trial, including an attempt to suggest a run for presidency, certainly. For Netanyahu running for the presidency is a sort of refuge."
Barak then claimed that Netanyahu seeks to continue running the country from the president's chair, and he explained how this could be possible. "There is no law in the country that says the president cannot be the head of the largest party in the Knesset. He will continue to run the country. It will be a black day for Israeli democracy if he even stands for election."
"Netanyahu has shown that no legal regulations really interest him, he can run the big party from the president's residence. Netanyahu is only concerned with rescuing himself from the trial, not with the country's citizens. He is responsible for the biggest failure in its history and he has to go home," charged the former Prime Minister.
Barak went on to blast Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, claiming, "He made a series of very serious mistakes. There was no substantive justification for determining in advance that Netanyahu was not a suspect [in the submarine affair], and that the matter was not criminal, and not to collect detailed testimony from Netanyahu immediately at the beginning of the affair. The Attorney General gave Netanyahu an endless number of discounts."
The submarine affair, claimed Barak, is "the most serious scandal in the history of the State of Israel. The possibility that the Israeli Prime Minister decides on his own, while ignoring the Defense Minister and Chief of Staff to remove Israel’s opposition to the supply of advanced submarines to Egypt, says that there was some secret, and it turns out that all the people who he claimed knew about it are denying they did. This thing is crazy."