Israeli opposition prepares to form government after Netanyahu’s failure | International

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – 71, including 15 at the head of power in Israel – failed at midnight on Tuesday in his fourth attempt to form a government since 2019. After the legal deadline expired, the political blockade installed in the institutions in spite of the successive electoral rehearsals, he truncated his goal. The President of the State of Israel, also conservative Reuven Rivlin, will now have three days to appoint another parliamentarian who aspires to form a majority government coalition. Opposition leader Yair Lapid is emerging as the candidate with the most options. In recent weeks, he has started rounds of negotiations with parties in the so-called Change Bloc to prepare to take over if the head of state decides to hand over to him.

“The time has come for a new government of change,” said Lapid, a 57-year-old former minister who entered politics in 2013 from the television popularity platform, on Tuesday. He promoted the government (between 2013 and 2015) legal reforms in favor of secularism which made him the great rival of the ultra-religious. His candidacy for the leadership of the broad coalition, focused on managing the economic crisis resulting from the pandemic, could be supported by an absolute majority held by up to eight of the 12 Knesset parties (120 seats in parliament).

After more than two years of political lockdown and four consecutive parliamentary elections without conclusive results, Netanyahu had drifted towards another call to the polls in the fall. But Israeli politicians and society do not seem willing this time to allow the electoral loop to go on forever. “Netanyahu is running out of rabbits in his hat,” he noted in his column for the newspaper. Maariv political analyst Ben Caspit.

The longest-ruling prime minister in Israel’s history has tried everything to stay safe from power against the corruption trial against him in Jerusalem. He ceded the first stint as managing director – in a possible rotating coalition pact – to some of his main center-right rivals; encouraged a small Islamist party – one in five Israeli citizens is Arab of Palestinian origin – to invest it in the Knesset, and even tried to change the rules of the electoral game at the last moment, with a bill unsuccessfully presented Tuesday afternoon before the House, so that the head of government is elected directly by the voters and not by the Parliament.

If his party, the Likud, was the most voted (30 seats) in the elections of March 23, the bloc with two political formations of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community (16 seats) and another of the religious extreme right (six ), it adds only 52 deputies. And the votes of 61 of the 120 Knesset MPs are inexorably required for nomination.

Other right-wing forces, like the religious nationalists of Yamina (seven seats), led by former minister Naftali Bennett, 49, do not guarantee him a majority either. Bennett also negotiated a possible pact with Lapid to remove Netanyahu from power and alternate as head of cabinet, in order to avoid calling the fifth election.

President Rivlin appears inclined to hand the task of forming a government to Lapid, according to what the Hebrew press reports in the early hours of Wednesday (shortly before midnight in mainland Spain), despite the fact that his centrist party, Yesh Atid, the second the most voted in the last elections, it has only 17 seats. To do this, he would have a maximum of four weeks before Rivlin finally had to hand the mission over to Parliament itself, which would have to negotiate for itself for another three weeks an exit from the political blockade. If this last period ends without tangible results, basic Israeli laws provide for the automatic calling of new parliamentary elections.

The Bloc por el Cambio led by Lapid hopes to unite two conservative parties (supporters of the West Bank settlements); two centrist forces collide with each other; the historic Labor Party (today at off-peak), the pacifist left facing the Jewish settlers, and four Arab parties, now divided into two currents.

Beyond irreconcilable programmatic differences and well-known demands from ministerial portfolios and senior officials, they seem to agree on one lowest common denominator: removing Netanyahu from power. KAN state radio political analyst Yoav Karkovsky predicted to his audience, according to the Reuters transcript, that Israel “has a 40% chance of having a new government and a 60% chance of moving towards it. ‘other elections’.

From the ceremonial figure to the decisive arbiter

The President of Israel is a ceremonial figure who, in the face of the political blockade, acquires decisive powers of arbitration. When his term expires, 81-year-old Reuven Rivlin is on the verge of making a decision that could transform a major shift in Israeli politics. The Prime Minister’s last-minute maneuvers have raised a smokescreen through which this seasoned politician must discern with his decades of experience as a minister and parliamentarian.