Israel: PM wants to dissolve parliament and call early elections

After exhausting all attempts to stabilize the coalition, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and […] Yaïr Lapid have decided to pass the law [de dissolution du Parlement] in the Knesset next weekthey underline in a press release, specifying that the rotation will be done in an orderly fashion.

MM. Bennett and Lapid had brought together in June 2021 a unique coalition in the history of Israel bringing together parties of the right, center, left, and for the first time, an Arab formation, in order to put an end to 12 years without interruption reign of Binyamin Netanyahu as head of government.

However, the Bennett-Lapid coalition agreement also provided for a rotation between the two men at the head of the government and the replacement of Mr. Bennett by Mr. Lapid in the event of the dissolution of Parliament.

If the bill aiming to dissolve the Parliament is indeed adopted by the deputies, Yaïr Lapid will thus become the new Prime Minister of Israel until the formation of a new government.

It is therefore the centrist Yaïr Lapid who should be prime minister during the visit scheduled for July 13 by American President Joe Biden, his first to Israel since his arrival at the White House in January 2021.

To weaken the coalition, the opposition inflicted a snub on it on June 6 by uniting a majority of votes against a bill aimed at extending the application of Israeli law to the more than 475,000 Israeli settlers living in the occupied West Bank.

And two members of the coalition, a deputy from the Arab Raam party and a deputy from the Meretz party (left), voted against the bill at first reading, thus calling into question the stability of the government led by Naftali Bennett.

In force since the start of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967, this law is automatically ratified every five years by Parliament.

In the weeks leading up to that vote, the coalition had already lost its majority with the departure of a member of Bennett’s Yamina party. And since this vote, another member of this right-wing party, Nir Orbach, has threatened to no longer support the government.

In this context, the opposition led by former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, accused of corruption in a series of cases, threatened to table a bill on Wednesday June 22 to dissolve Parliament.

But Mr Bennett’s coalition appeared to want to take the initiative by itself calling for the dissolution of parliament, which would lead to new elections on October 25, according to local media, the fifth in less than four years in Israel. .

The lack of responsibility of some elected members of the coalition led to this inevitable result. The objective of the next elections is clear: to prevent Netanyahu from returning to power and using the state for his personal needs.said Justice Minister Gideon Saar, who leads the right-wing New Hope party.

The latest polls still place Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud (right) in the lead in voting intentions, but without exceeding the majority threshold (61 deputies out of the 120 in Parliament) with its allies from the ultra-Orthodox parties and the ‘far right.

In all the polls of the past two months, only one has credited Netanyahu and his allies with 61 seats and that’s been a few weeks already. So it’s not like there’s a favorable trend towards him, indicated to theAFP Israeli analyst Dahlia Scheindlin.