Thursday, November 4th, 2021
New elections off the table
Israel’s parliament settles budget dispute
The dispute over the budget is already costing Netanyahu his post as Prime Minister of Israel. His successor Bennett barely escapes new elections: The Knesset now votes with a wafer-thin majority for the state budget – the new government is still fragile.
Israel’s parliament approved the 2021 budget in Jerusalem. This avoids a new election for the time being. “A public holiday for the State of Israel,” wrote Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Twitter. The budget was approved by a majority of 61 of the 120 MPs, as reported by the Israeli media. Parliament then began voting to pass the 2022 budget.
The Bennett government of the far-right Jamina party had to bring the budget through the parliament by November 14th. Otherwise the Knesset in Jerusalem would have automatically dissolved. A new election would have had to take place 90 days later. The new Bennett administration was sworn in in mid-June. The permanent political crisis in Israel thus came to an end for the time being with four elections within two years. However, the coalition only has a wafer-thin majority in parliament. It is supported by a total of eight parties from the right to the left – including an Arab party for the first time.
Last year, the then government under the long-term right-wing conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to reach an agreement on a budget. Shortly before Christmas, the Knesset dissolved. This was followed by the March election, which resulted in the Bennett government. The last time the Knesset passed a budget for the time being was in March 2018 for the year 2019. Since then, the country has been governed on the basis of the previous year’s budget, as a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Finance announced before the vote.
Dispute over settlement construction in the West Bank
The responsible finance committee of the Knesset had already confirmed the budget last week with a volume of the equivalent of 165 billion euros for 2021 and 155 billion euros for 2022. In recent weeks, Bennett had called on the coalition partners to stick together so as not to endanger the narrow majority in the Knesset and thus the continued existence of the government. For example, the members of the Arab Raam party had repeatedly criticized the government for failing to implement financial and substantive promises for the Arab sector. Conflicts have recently intensified between the right and left coalition parties: the decision to publish tenders for the marketing of more than 1,300 settler apartments in the occupied West Bank was criticized by the left-liberal Meretz party.
Jonathan Rynhold, professor of politics at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv, sees the government now strengthened by the adoption of the budget for the time being. He assumes that the government will stay together as long as opposition leader Netanyahu remains a threat to the coalition. Rynhold said, “The danger to the government comes when Bennett has to hand over to (Jair) Lapid.” When forming a government, the coalition parties agreed that Foreign Minister Lapid – from the center-right Yesch Atid party – should replace Bennett as prime minister in August 2023. Rynhold assumes that the pressure on the right-wing politicians in the coalition to leave them will then increase.