Just 27% of Israelis say they trust Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to handle the country’s burgeoning coronavirus crisis, according to the results of an opinion poll released Wednesday by the Guttman Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute. This reflects a drop of more than 30 percentage points since the beginning of April, when Israel was cited as being among those countries fighting the pandemic best. Experts say the situation headed south in late May when the prime minister too quickly and perhaps too enthusiastically lifted many restrictions, exhorting viewers in a live broadcast to go out and celebrate by having a beer. The number of new cases reported that day was in the low double digits. On Tuesday, the figure for new cases was close to 7,000, with a positivity rate for testing at about 12%. In many regards, Israel is now leading the world in coronavirus statistics on a per capita basis and is believed to be the first nation to reenter a lockdown. Though not covered in the survey, the main complaints about Netanyahu concern a string of policy flip-flops and special dispensations following sectoral pressure, for example from the country’s ultra-Orthodox communities, which provide a main pillar of his political support yet account for a large part of the country’s morbidity statistics.
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