With a deadline looming and no coalition in sight, Israel’s prime minister could take the country into uncharted waters
Israelis in recent weeks have been watching a political soap opera, and the story line is leading to a possible scenario that the country has never seen: new elections within weeks of the last.
The national voting on April 9 left the nation’s two largest parties – Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud and the centrist Blue and White list led by political novice Benny Gantz – with 35 seats each in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, the Knesset.
It was a tie, pure and simple. What’s more, neither side would be able to form a government on its own. But because a sufficient number of the remaining seats were won by smaller parties with a right-wing outlook, the country’s semi-figurehead president, Reuven Rivlin, awarded Netanyahu the mandate to go ahead and take the first crack at forming a coalition, with a deadline of 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday.
One of those smaller parties, however, had ideas of its own. Its leader, Avigdor Liberman, a one-time Netanyahu protégé, is avowedly secular and against widespread draft deferrals for young ultra-Orthodox men. These deferrals are a basic demand of the two ultra-Orthodox parties that have loudly and clearly expressed their readiness to join a Netanyahu-led government.
Taken together, these two parties can bring 16 seats into the coalition to Liberman’s five. It doesn’t take much to figure out who has Netanyahu’s ear. But the Moldova-born Liberman is nothing if not stubborn. He knows how to throw his considerable weight around. He rarely smiles. In fact, he is usually caricatured by Israeli satirists as an intimidating Soviet-era tyrant, and he’s well aware that without his party’s five seats, the best Netanyahu can come up with is a 60-member coalition, exactly one seat shy of the barest of bare majorities.
“Micropolitically speaking, this is all about political brinkmanship,” Amotz Asa-El, an Israeli political commentator and most recently author of “The Jewish March of Folly,” a look at the political history of the Jewish people, told The Media Line.
According to Asa-El, though, it goes deeper than just the principle of an equal draft law for all.
“Liberman,” he said, “is trying to exploit the unique circumstances this election created in order to, in my view, position himself as a potential successor to Netanyahu because I think he smells Netanyahu’s blood.”
That “blood” is the looming indictments hanging over Netanyahu’s head in three separate criminal cases. All of these cases involve charges of fraud and breach of public trust, and one also involves the far more serious charge of bribery.
It’s widely believed that Netanyahu expedited the last elections, which were not due to take place until November, in hopes of forestalling the indictments with a resounding political victory. In addition, it’s no secret that some of the wheeling and dealing going on in the coalition talks have involved promises made by potential partners to support legislation that would give Netanyahu immunity from prosecution as long as he’s prime minister.
“The macropolitical processes at play here are extremely alarming, regardless of one’s political colors. What we’re seeing here is potentially hammering away at the foundations of the Israeli political system,” Asa-El continued.
“Everyone is talking for weeks now, namely about the way Netanyahu is treating his legal situation in total disregard of the broader [political] situation. He’s trying to tie the two together, and that in my view compromises the legal foundation of the system,” he explained.
“What Liberman is doing,” Asa-El went on, “is a different type of threat to Israeli democracy because…[this] might potentially lead us to an election within weeks of [the last] election, something that never happened in this country and is extremely destabilizing.”
Netanyahu is nowhere near as stiff-necked as Liberman is. In fact, he is a master politician known for his astounding ability to stay afloat in a swamp that has claimed the political lives of others just as talented. Still, handing the coalition mandate back to Rivlin would leave Netanyahu far more open to the probability of indictment and trial, so his latest threat is to dissolve the Knesset mere weeks after its members were sworn in, having heard that recent polls show the Israeli Right might – might – end up with one or two more seats than it won on April 9.
One would be entitled to think, however, that the ball should be in the hands of Rivlin. It was Rivlin, after all, who had the power to give the coalition mandate to Netanyahu, so it should be Rivlin who has the power to take it back and give it to, say, Gantz.
Not so fast.
“There is a clause in the Basic Law: Government,” Dr. Ofer Kenig, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told The Media Line, talking about one of the legal foundations Israel uses in place of a constitution. “[It says that] if the Knesset, with an absolute majority of 61 [votes], decides to call early elections, then this decision can interrupt the government formation process” without needing to send the mandate back to the president.
“I think that what bothers Netanyahu the most,” Kenig elaborated, “is a scenario in which [the] Wednesday night [deadline] approaches and he hasn’t succeeded in forming a government, and the ball automatically returns to [Rivlin]…. Then Netanyahu loses control of the process, [and] this is why he’d like to remain a step ahead.”
If anything, Kenig says, the entire saga of Netanyahu’s attempt to form a coalition has left people puzzled.
“The election results were so sound and clear,” he told The Media Line, referring to the 65 seats Netanyahu was all but assured of securing for his government.
“It will all boil down to the minds of two men,” he said, referring to Netanyahu and Liberman. “And try going into those two minds.”