Israel government heads for a fall while struggling with new covid crisis
Title : Israel government heads for a fall while struggling with new covid crisis
Link : Israel government heads for a fall while struggling with new covid crisis
The government coalition is on a knife edge, its survival depending on two incompatible politicians: PM Binyamin Netanyahu and Alternate PM defense minister Benny Gant. One or the other must give way to beat the Knesset dissolution vote on Wednesday, Dec. 2. However, after eight months in office, their Likud and Kahol Lavan parties have never managed to overcome their dissonance to consummate a working partnership for beating the covid pandemic and its collateral economic damage.
This week, the virus again started lurching out of control. Tuesday, Dec. 1, saw 1,227 new cases, the highest since mid-October. A massive five-day shopping binge in 15 reopened malls was a glaring testament to the ministers’ latest bungled decision and the inevitability of a third lockdown.
It is up to PM Netanyahu to table the 2021 state budget by Dec. 23, or else the government falls. It is up to alternate prime minister Gantz to decide whether his segment of Kahol Lavan awards his erstwhile co-leader Yair Lapid a majority for the motion to dissolve the Knesset on Wednesday.
Two factions allied with Gantz holding ministerial posts, Labor and Derekh Eretz, have declared their support for the opposition motion, echoing the argument that the absence of a budget and chaotic mismanagement has paralyzed governance. The defense minister must determine whether his core faction, Resilience, also throws in its lot with the opposition. Gantz accuses Netanyahu of putting his personal legal troubles ahead of the country’s needs.
The Kahol Lavan leader has to struggle with a personal dilemma. Is giving up his alliance with detested Likud rival, in response to pressure from his followers and the taunts of Lapid, worth the candle, when it would kill his only chance of gaining the premiership in eleven months’ time. It is then that his rotation deal with the Likud leader is due to come into effect. His advisers warn him that Netanyahu has no intention anyway of making good on that commitment. So why hang on to an increasingly unpopular relationship? .
The prime minister has said little about his intentions, beside commenting brusquely that elections would be bad for the country. The pundits say that he has systematically delayed tabling the state budget for the years 2020 and 2021 as a lever to hold over the heads of an unruly coalition partner. The budget issue gives him the option of determining if and when an election would benefit Likud – for example, when the first coronavirus vaccines come on tap next year. Dissolution over the budget issue, would, moreover, leave him at the head of a caretaker government until an election.
Aside from the covid vaccines, Netanyahu appears to be counting on his extraordinary feats of regional peacemaking and other signal accomplishments to see him through the woods. However, the unending pandemic is eroding popular readiness to put up with irksome restrictions, financial troubles and emotional depression, as the ministers he leads seesaw helplessly on the brink of another lockdown. Furthermore, his opponents’ personal antipathy to him and his family overrules rational politics. It is reflected in vacant senior positions which the two parties can’t agree to fill.
Neither of the main parties can count on a majority for or against dissolution. A decision by Gantz to join the opposition would tip the scales in its favor. The religious parties are solidly behind Netanyahu. Right-wing Yamina, estranged from Likud, is soaring in the polls and its leader Naphtali Bennett is toying with pretensions to the premiership. The United Arab Front is divided; Mansour Abbas, leader of the Ra’am party has been engaged in talks with the prime minister.
Even if the Knesset carries the dissolution motion on Wednesday, it would not snap into effect at once. This preliminary vote must go to committee and outlast three full readings before enactment. In the interim, the door would be wide open for horse-trading to save the day before a new election, the fourth in less than two years, takes place three months later.
Israel government heads for a fall while struggling with new covid crisis
Israel government heads for a fall while struggling with new covid crisis
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