Binyamin Netanyahu New Likud Leader

Former Israeli Prime Minister and Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appears to become the new leader of Israel's main right-wing party, Likud, after Ariel Sharon left the party to form a new centrist party called Kadima. After Sharon's departure, Likud have fallen back to third place after Kadima and the Labor Party.

While some of my libertarian friends may disagree with Netanyahu's "hard-line" policies towards the Palestinians, his economic program is , while not consistently libertarian, the by far most free market oriented in Israeli politics as is shown in this 2002 article called "Restoring Israel's Prosperity".

Apart from his call for more government "investments", his plan for strengthening Israel's economy is all about making the Israeli economy freer, with large spending cuts, large tax cuts and privatizations.

During his past terms as Prime Minister and Finance Minister, he made some progress on these areas, although these reforms were not radical enough. Right now, these limited reforms have together with a global recovery in the tech sector and a improved security situation produced a strong recovery in the Israeli economy, now growing at a 6% rate. But for this recovery to be sustainable, further free market reforms must be implemented.