JERUSALEM — Seven weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared “a night of tremendous victory” in Israel’s election, his failure to form a government by midnight Wednesday has turned into a stunning debacle for him and thrust Israel into a new election.
Israelis will return to the ballot box in about three months, the first time in the country’s history that it has been forced to hold a new national election because of a failure to form a government after the previous one.
The Israeli Parliament voted to disperse itself late Wednesday, only a month after being sworn in, with a majority of 74 in favor and 45 against in the 120-seat body. One member was absent.
The vote sets in motion a new election and casts a cloud over the future of Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister for the last decade.
After the April 9 election, Mr. Netanyahu was confident that his conservative Likud party would easily form a coalition with its past right-wing and religious allies. But his plans were stymied by a power struggle between secular ultranationalist and ultra-Orthodox factions, who refused to compromise on proposed legislation on military service.
Facing possible corruption charges, Mr. Netanyahu had less political wiggle room to turn to more liberal parties and failed to assemble the 61-seat majority required to form a government.
President Reuven Rivlin had given Mr. Netanyahu six weeks to form a government, the maximum allowed by law. With hours to go before the deadline of midnight in Israel, Mr. Rivlin addressed an increasingly baffled public via social media to try to explain what could happen next.
Mr. Rivlin said he could offer another member of Parliament the chance to form a government or he could tell the speaker of Parliament that efforts to form a coalition had failed and that there would be no alternative to calling new elections.
But Mr. Netanyahu pre-empted Mr. Rivlin, whom he considers a foe, from choosing someone else to lead a new government by having his Likud party advance its own bill to disperse the Parliament before the president could act.
The main stumbling block to forming a coalition was Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the secular ultranationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu.
With Likud, the ultra-Orthodox parties and other right-wing allies commanding only 60 parliamentary seats — one short of a majority — Mr. Lieberman’s five seats made him a kingmaker. He sought to position himself as the champion of Israel’s secular right and a bulwark against the growing influence of the ultra-Orthodox parties.
Mr. Netanyahu has long been nicknamed “the magician” for the political wizardry that has kept him in office continuously for the last decade, in addition to three years in the 1990s.
But he is facing charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three corruption cases, and those legal troubles hampered his chances of forming an alternative government, lessening his leverage in coalition negotiations.
The main opposition party, the centrist Blue and White, which won 35 seats in April, the same number as Likud, has refused to be part of a government with a prime minister facing indictment.
Mr. Netanyahu was given the mandate to form a government by Mr. Rivlin in April, on the recommendation of 65 legislators, including those from Mr. Lieberman’s party. Mr. Lieberman says he still supports Mr. Netanyahu for the premiership, and no other candidate, but will enter a Netanyahu government only on his terms.
Even as his party moved to disperse Parliament, the prime minister blamed Mr. Lieberman for the political impasse. In a televised address Monday night at prime time, Mr. Netanyahu said, “There is no point in dragging the country to elections, which will cost a fortune and paralyze us all. Another six months? What have we turned into, into what Italy used to be?”
Mr. Lieberman, an unpredictable tough-talker with a penchant for political drama, has a long history of rivalry with Mr. Netanyahu, as well as periods of close cooperation.
Mr. Lieberman brought his party into the last Netanyahu government in 2016, a year into its term, stabilizing an administration that previously had a parliamentary majority of only one. Mr. Lieberman insisted on being defense minister. He then resigned from the post in November, citing what he described as the government’s soft policy toward Gaza and calling for early elections.
The policy he objected to — facilitating transfers of millions of dollars of cash from Qatar to Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, to maintain a fragile calm — has not changed.
At the core of the latest political crisis was a sharp disagreement between Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox allies over legislation to replace a military draft law that exempted ultra-Orthodox men. Israel’s Supreme Court has set a deadline of late July to replace the draft law.
Mr. Lieberman has insisted that a new law that would set modest quotas for enlisting ultra-Orthodox men must pass without alteration. The religious parties, which have 16 parliamentary seats, insist it must be softened.
The issue of unequal conscription has long roiled Israeli society and politics. Most Jewish 18-year-olds are drafted for more than two years. But Mr. Lieberman has also said that the military draft law is just a “symptom” of a broader battle over the character of the country.
In a Facebook post late Tuesday, he denied that he was involved in any personal “vendetta” against Mr. Netanyahu or was seeking to topple him, as some Likud officials had suggested.
He wrote: “I am for the state of Israel, I am for a Jewish state, but I am against a state based on Jewish religious law.”
Source : Nytimes
