NETANYAHU’S FIFTH TERM AS PRIME MINISTER IS SHAKY

Amid coalition row, Lieberman warns Israel could be ‘on its way to elections’

Israel Hayom
May 24, 2019

Former defense minister Avigdor Liberman said on Friday that Israel might be “on its way to elections” after his party refused to join a coalition due to a disagreement over the haredi draft law.

Speaking to Israel’s Channel 13, the secular-nationalist Yisrael Beytenu party leader said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud had conducted the coalition talks “in an arrogant and pathetic manner.”

In a column published in the Yedioth Ahronoth daily Friday morning, Lieberman – who quit in the wake of a Gaza confrontation in November 2018, precipitating the last elections – said his uncompromising stance on the draft law was mostly a matter of principle.

“The system being built within the State of Israel is a threat to the character and fabric of Israeli society as a whole,” he wrote, “because of the values on which young people grow up within haredi [ultra-Orthodox] society.”

Other right-wing parties agreed to enter a coalition on Thursday, but are missing one seat in order to achieve a majority – with Yisrael Beytenu’s five MKs necessary to push them comfortably over the threshold.

With the deadline for forming a new government fast approaching – just four days away – there is growing speculation that Netanyahu would try to call, or threaten to call, early elections.

According to political insiders who spoke with Israel Hayom, Netanyahu may soon draft a bill to dissolve the Knesset, figuring another march to the polls is the only means of breaking the impasse in the coalition talks.

The sources said that Netanyahu had come to the conclusion that Lieberman was no longer holding negotiations in good faith and was not planning on joining Netanyahu’s fifth government, should it form.

Netanyahu asked the other party leaders to meet him at his office late Thursday, making a last-minute plea to work together and avert another election, even if that meant having to form a coalition without Yisrael Beytenu.

Such a coalition, as states, would comprise only 60 of the 120 Knesset votes, meaning it could win a confidence vote and remain in power only if Lieberman’s faction chooses to abstain in crucial votes.

At the end of the meeting, the parties issued a statement urging Lieberman to show flexibility so that a new government could be formed.

The statement further said that if the former defense minister hunkered down, they would have no choice but to form a coalition with the minimum 60 votes in the assumption that Lieberman would not actively help topple it.

Earlier this month, President Reuven Rivlin gave Netanyahu a two-week extension to form a government. If the prime minister fails to pass a confidence vote by the end of those two weeks and swear-in the new government, the president will have to tap another MK, presumably from Likud, to form a government.

The conventional wisdom is that Netanyahu would want to avoid that scenario at all costs, even if that means calling another election, less than two months after he won a fifth term.