MK Matan Kahana (Yamina) visited the Arutz Sheva studio in Jerusalem Monday to discuss the upcoming elections later this month. Kahana continues to be evasive when asked whether his party would join a coalition led by Binyamin Netanyahu.
"We are walking with the people of Israel, we are an ideological right-wing party," Kahana says. " "Yair Lapid is a good person, but he cannot be the prime minister of Israel because he is from the left."
"In Israel, there are at least 80 seats from the right, and therefore the next prime minister will be from the right," MK Kahana states.
When asked if party chairman Naftali Bennett is planning to form a 'technical bloc' with New Hope leader Gideon Sa'ar following the elections, Kahana replies: "Gideon Sa'ar is a skilled politician and a fine man, but he is not suitable to lead Israel."
Kahana also says of Sa'ar that "this is a person who, in the middle of the greatest crisis the people of Israel have faced, was engaged in finding defamatory material about Naftali Bennett and distributing it illegally. This is not leadership - this is cowardice."
When asked if there is another party that would recommend Naftali Bennett for prime minister after the election, MK Kahana replies, "We need to see what will be the day after the election. We hope that people will vote for Naftali Bennett behind the curtain. We will do our best with the seats we will receive in order to establish a right-wing, ideological government here and get the people of Israel out of this situation."
Netanyahu also wants to form a 'full-fledged' right-wing government, why not go with him?
"The people have a good memory and know that Netanyahu has forgotten what it means to be right-wing. He is now sitting in government with Amir Peretz, Itzik Shmuli and Benny Gantz. Netanyahu does not want to be right-wing, he is afraid of being right-wing."
What is the position of the Yamina party regarding the Supreme Court's ruling on conversions?
"We support the Nissim outline. Unfortunately Smotrich chose to fully align with the haredi approach. We all know the problems with the Nissim outline, we know it can be corrected. We missed a great opportunity to establish Orthodox conversions as part of the state conversion in Israel because of the haredi 'all or nothing' approach. We will establish orthodox conversion through the Nissim outline."