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Israel’s Government Grows Increasingly Unstable; Election Talk Fill the Media


Election fever is filling the air over Israel as attacks on Prime Minister Netanyahu grow louder and more frequent and media begins a new fixation on the possible permutations for the formation of a new government following elections. Relations between the PM and the Yesh Atid  party – a coalition partner headed by first-time politico Yair Lapid – have grown increasingly edgy while Netanyahu – and his political opponents — openly court the religious parties left out of his current coalition for which inclusion in a government means significant government largesse. The most recent polling shows Netanyahu in a strong position to retain his position as prime minister presiding over a distinctively right wing government, although some see an alternative in an alliance between the religious parties and those in the center and left-of-center. For some of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s critics, pushing for elections is a double-edged sword. Polls show Lapid’s party, for instance, as a big loser the next time around while Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, whose new party survived a poor showing in the last election and was salvaged by accepting Netanyahu’s invitation to join the coalition, is predicted to fall short of the threshold and vanish from the parliament.