Will Israel's political structure change drastically after the March 2015 elections? Dr. Eyal Levin, an expert in political psychology at the University of Ariel, stated to Arutz Sheva Friday that the answer is clear: Not at all.
According to Levin, the series of political upheavals characterizing this round of elections - including the Hatnua-Labor pact, Moshe Kahlon's new party, the Shas-Yachad split and rumors of a Jewish Home-Tekuma split - do not cause significant changes practically for the future of Israeli politics.
"There is no political turmoil and there is no real change," Levin said. "What we see before our eyes is a lot of mudslinging but in the end we show up eventually with two sociological groups of what might be called the 'right' and 'left' which will not stand with each other. Both are the same size they have always been since the sixties."
Levin added that, despite the popular perception of the 1977 [election of Menachem Begin as Prime Minister, marking the first time since Israel's inception that Labor was not the ruling party - ed.] revolution, the '77 revolution was not revolutionary at all.
"There was no revolution in '77," he said. "There was a different division of the electorate but the growth of the right-wing bloc began in the late sixties. In '77 it merely got a little bigger."
"This is a developmental process in which one group is growing as the other does not," he explained, "but all in all the change took decades."
Levin also noted that, in his view, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's decision to form a right-wing bloc after the past elections was not only a politically sound decision, but also a strategic one. According to Levin, the logical decision is to form a coalition based on natural partnerships between parties and not to forge a new type of coalition and risk political instability.
"This was a natural partnership that arose between parties in the right-wing bloc," Levin said. "There were also those who did not join [the coalition], but there was not much he could do about that."
However, he does not have much optimism for the next elections.
"When you throw someone out and try to replace them with someone else as Netanyahu tried to do to create a revolution, there is nothing there if the nation hasn't changed," he said. "The move is bound to be a failure before it even begins."
He concluded that, no matter what the outcome, roughly half of Israel's population is due to be angry at the current government - as the nation itself is not bound to change anytime in the near future.