Israel's outgoing government tries to block Netanyahu's return to power

The climate of apparent moderation that has dominated political life in Israel during the last year has turned into an atmosphere of tension as the parties are forced to call the fifth elections in three years.

The prime minister, Naftali Bennett, and the foreign minister and strong man of the broad coalition government, Yair Lapid, agreed on Monday to promote the dissolution of the Knesset (Parliament) and advance the legislative elections to the fall.

The heterogeneous association of eight political forces that supports the Executive has accelerated this Tuesday the step so that the first of the four plenary votes that must end the legislature be held this Wednesday.

Bennett has thrown in the towel after three of the seven deputies of his party (Yamina, ultra-nationalist) left him and two Arab parliamentarians broke the voting discipline.

In accordance with the provisions of the coalition agreements signed a year ago, he is about to hand over the position to Lapid, leader of the second formation with the most votes in the Knesset —Yesh Atid (There is a Future, in Hebrew)— after the Netanyahu's Likud.

If the bill for the dissolution of Parliament, an attribution that the fundamental Israeli laws do not assign to the head of the Government, manages to overcome two votes in committee and four in plenary session, the legislature that emerged from the 2021 elections will be finalized.

The holding of the next legislative elections will automatically be set for four months from now, expectedly on October 25,

Two leaders of the outgoing coalition have also proposed the urgent approval of a law that vetoes the presentation of a prosecuted candidate like Netanyahu, who has been on trial for two years for corruption.

These are two conservative leaders who were politically trained in the ranks of Netanyahu's Likud party, like Bennett, but ended up challenging his authoritarian hyper-leadership.

Avigdor Lieberman, current Minister of Finance, and Gideon Saar, now Minister of Justice, have promoted the legislative reform to exclude the defendants from the race to the polls.

Both have announced this Tuesday that they will not join forces with Netanyahu's religious right bloc, who was head of government between 1996 and 1999 and later for 12 consecutive years (1999-2021).

The polls place Likud in the lead, with an expectation of more than 30 deputies in the fragmented Knesset, and Netanyahu could approach 60 seats along with his allies from two ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties and the extreme right, although without crossing the bar of the absolute largest.

The Arab parties, which represent 20% of the 9.5 million Israelis, have already anticipated that they will not lend him any support after Likud's association with anti-Arab and racist parliamentarians such as the extremist Itamar Ben Gvir.

"The first polls of voting intentions after the fall of the Bennet-Lapid government convey the sense of continuity of the tie between the two dominant political blocs in Israel," says electoral analyst Daniel Kupervaser, who considers these initial predictions to be premature, by not taking into consideration yet two key aspects that the so-called Government of change bequeaths and that could become catalysts for change.

“In the first place, the fact that a coalition of parties with very contradictory political platforms has been able to superimpose the general interest of the citizens over the personal interests of the leader, as was the case in the Netanyahu governments.

Secondly, the breaking of the taboo on the integration for the first time in the history of an Israeli Arab party in the government coalition”,

Kupervaser argues.

"The Bennett-Lapid government did not basically differ from the basic political lines of those of Netanyahu, but it was conducted in a much more democratic, less authoritarian way," he adds.

The betrayal of the pact with the Arabs

The only coalition in Israel that has had an Arab party among its partners is history.

Labor Party member Isaac Rabin received the support of the representatives of the country's main minority three decades ago to be able to carry out the Oslo Agreements with the Palestinians, but without them becoming part of the government pact.

The conflict with the Palestinians has now been the main cause of the fall of the coalition that removed Netanyahu from power 12 months ago.

The small conservative Islamist party Raam, led by Mansur Abbas, supported the government of change, but the clashes between protesters and police that shook the Old City of Jerusalem last spring led him to freeze his support for the Cabinet of Bennett and Lapid.

“The next electoral campaign is going to turn on two axes.

In the first, the Likud is going to accuse (the outgoing government) of having committed the unforgivable sin, treason against the homeland, of incorporating an Arab party into the coalition,” renowned columnist Nahum Barnea predicted on Tuesday in the pages of

It is necessary to remember that, to guarantee continuity in power, Netanyahu did not hesitate to negotiate a possible coalition with Mansur Abbas a year ago.

As a second axis, the Likud leader is once again at the center of the electoral debate in Israel, between two camps polarized by a dilemma: Bibi yes or no.

Or, as is more usual: only Bibi or anyone but Bibi.

Added to the tension with the Palestinians over the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is the nationalist right's rejection of Bennett and Lapid's political alliance with the Islamist Raam party.

Netanyahu's supporters have pointed to the cause of the wave of attacks that hit several cities in the country in March and April, in which several attackers were Arabs with Israeli nationality, the rupture of the coexistence between the Jewish majority and the Arab minority, after the outbreak of intercommunal violence that surrounded the Gaza war in 2021. "The coalition has not been able to survive its agony," says political analyst Nadav Eyal.

"It was formed on the premise of parties with very different points of view regarding the relationship with the Palestinians," emphasizes the columnist, "but the wave of terrorism left the government in a catatonic state."

Record number of calls to the polls in the last quarter of a century

From 1996, when Benjamin Netanyahu won his first elections, until this year, in which the conservative leader hopes to revalidate his sixth term as prime minister, Israel has broken the record for calls to the polls among Western countries.

It has held general elections every 2.4 years, even more frequently than Greece (2.5) and Spain (2.9), which follow closely behind in a study by the Institute for Democracy in Israel, cited by the

informative digital portal

.

However, until 2019, when the cycle of instability that led to a prolonged political blockade began, with four legislative elections convened in less than two years, the Jewish state was in the middle of the table, in seventh position.

In this central position, countries such as the United Kingdom or Germany border on four years between elections, and in practice complete their legislatures.

Israel's electoral leadership comes at a price.

Without taking into account the paralysis of public administration, the estimates of the Ministry of Finance and employer organizations have raised the expenditure item of each of the legislative elections held since 2019 to about one billion shekels (more than 275 million euros), according to data collected by the Hebrew press, which accounted for the costs of organizing the elections and the subsidies for the parties' campaign.

However, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange has barely flinched by the umpteenth political crisis and has reacted this Tuesday with a slight rise and the strengthening of the shekel against the dollar.

For companies, the bill derived from the elections is higher.

Election day, always called on a working day,

It is semi-holiday in Israel to favor the influx to the polls.

The non-essential public sector closes its doors and most private companies give their workers the day off.

Those who continue to work, as is the case of employees in hotels and other entertainment venues, are compensated with double pay.

In addition, the study by the Institute for Democracy in Israel discovers that, contrary to widespread belief derived from countless changes of government, the terms of office of parliamentarians in Italy have had an average duration of 4.4 years during the last quarter century. without having to go through the voting booth again.

They are only surpassed in the classification by those of the Legislative Chambers of Ireland (4.5), with the particularity, of course, that both in Rome and in Dublin the seats are renewed every five years.

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