Israel’s flimsy and transient coalition government said on Monday that it will introduce a measure to dissolve Parliament the next week, triggering a sixth election in three years and the potential return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu, the nation’s longest-serving Prime Minister.
The four prior elections in Israel held between 2019 and 2021 essentially served as plebiscites on whether Netanyahu could hold office while being tried for grave corruption allegations. Indicted in November 2019, Netanyahu has refuted the charges.
According to the power-sharing agreement of the ruling coalition, after the bill is approved, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, head of the right-wing political coalition Yamina, will step down and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, head of the liberal centrist Yesh Atid party, will take over as acting PM until a new government is formed. According to analysts, elections will happen in the fall.
Following the departure of a member of Bennett’s Yamina party in April, the ideologically split coalition—the most varied in Israel’s history—lost its slim majority. On June 6, the opposition helped reject a bill that would have renewed legal safeguards for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, which was the government’s largest loss.
Right-wing Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu was able to pull together a government coalition at the last minute after being elected to a fourth term in 2015. Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the right-wing secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, resigned as his defence minister in April 2019, forcing him to dissolve Parliament and call early elections.
A new election was held in September 2019 as a result of Netanyahu’s failure to obtain enough seats to form a government. But once more, neither Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party nor Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were successful in forming a cabinet.
The only method to break a deadlock in the Israeli system is to keep having elections until someone wins a majority, therefore a third election was conducted in March 2020, which was also inconclusive.
Together with his main competitor Gantz, Netanyahu was able to create a “emergency” coalition government in April 2020. This shaky partnership would only continue for seven months, as in December the divided ruling coalition failed to pass the Knesset budget, calling for a fourth election to be held in March 2021.
In June 2021, Bennett was appointed as the next prime minister, replacing Netanyahu, who had served as interim prime minister for the previous 12 years. According to the coalition agreement, Lapid was to succeed him in two years.
Netanyahu has termed the events “excellent news for millions of Israeli people” and pledged to return to power as prime minister as Israel waits for elections, which will probably take place at the end of October due to legislative restrictions and holiday delays.
Recent surveys indicate that Netanyahu’s Likud will likely make up the majority in the upcoming Knesset. Whether he will be able to put together a government coalition is still up in the air, as the most recent elections have demonstrated. Some parties will probably seek to join up with Likud only if Netanyahu steps down as party head, according to a story in The New York Times. The allegations of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust, for which he is presently on trial, have been described by the former Prime Minister as a “witchhunt.”
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