Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked with Yamina MK Matan Kahana
Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked with Yamina MK Matan KahanaCourtesy

With recent polls indicating that the Yamina party will fail to cross the electoral threshold in elections this November, the new party leader, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, is scrambling to hold the party together.

However, the composition of her party's list is far from final, with negotiations with the Derech Eretz faction of Yoaz Hendel and Zvi Hauser having stalled, and various party members poised to jump ship for better offers elsewhere.

According to a report on Reshet Bet, Shaked's latest headache comes in the form of deputy Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana, with whom she had a "difficult" meeting recently. During their conversation, Shaked apparently told Kahana that he would have to align his positions with her own, and that if he refused to do so, he would end up on the outside.

Shaked was likely motivated in her demand by a number of interviews Kahana recently granted to the media during which he said, among other things, that a "narrow right-wing government" would be a "disaster" and that he has no intention of joining such a government. Shaked's position as the head of a party she is attempting to rebrand as genuinely right-wing sustained significant damage from Kahana's statement, and she has now asked Kahana to refrain from granting further interviews without prior coordination with her.

Responding to the report on Reshet Bet, the offices of both Shaked and Kahana issued a statement saying that, "Kahana and Shaked meet on a daily basis and coordinate their moves together."