Let’s go back to the past for a moment: the Netanyahu-Ganz government is not well remembered mainly because the civil wars in it were endless, and government meetings were almost unnecessary, since nothing came first.
Now a sharp leap has been made for the present: the Bennett-Lapid government has been in existence for eight and a half months, and at least as far as the Knesset is concerned, for the purpose of continuous coalition function, the situation is much more complicated.
Until the budget was approved everything worked out pretty well, except for a few misses and a significant drop in the Citizenship Act, but that’s because everyone wanted to get over the budget hurdle, and also because that was the start – but in recent weeks the coalition has frozen.
Previous prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu and Bnei Gantz. Begins to look similar (Photo: Alex Kolomoisky, Paul)
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Here is a partial list: RAAM imposed a boycott of votes for three weeks in a row, for alternating reasons; Meretz MK overthrew the recruitment law and delayed its enactment process; RAAM and Meretz threaten significant steps after passing the citizenship law over their heads; Labor and Meretz against Finance Minister Lieberman’s minimum wage plan; And this week it was the second largest party in the coalition, blue and white for its eight seats, that decided to wave a red flag to Prime Ministers Bennett and Lapid, and burn another day of government legislation.
In about three weeks, the Knesset will go on a break that will last until after Pesach, with a particularly large legislative stoppage, of dozens of things that are important to the activities of government ministries. The snowball that will lead to the dissolution of the government has already begun to roll, the question of when it will become large enough to decide its fate.
Among other things, it should be noted that Foreign Minister Lapid is making good use of the political roles he has to share – for his political needs: Remember the Meretz MK who overthrew the law? She was then appointed Consul General in Shanghai, a very significant city in the Chinese economy, and hence particularly important to the Israeli economy. As far as Lapid is concerned this is a direct continuation of the appointments of associates as he wished, all men have a future or are important for his political advancement in the immediate term. The main thing is a little less coalition headaches.
If you thought that was the end of Yair Lapid’s problem – because for Naftali Bennett it is less of a problem after a relatively respectable time as prime minister – then Eli Avidar decided to put the Sixty-one coalition in another spin, announcing that he would resign from the cabinet and return to the Knesset.
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Deputy Prime Minister Yair Lapid. Need to start worrying? (Photo: Jonathan Zindel, Flash 90)
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The minister “in the prime minister’s office”, who had a code for a minister without a portfolio, expected to receive the intelligence portfolio, and since that did not happen – he realized that the best thing for him was to return to being the rebellious finger in the Knesset, after Walid Taha, Mazen Ghanaim and more.
If until now there has been some kind of upper framework that allowed the coalition leaders to solve problems, Avidar and his individual faction arrive and put everyone into a deeper problem.
There was a verse that was said a lot during the days of the Netanyahu-Gantz government that did not function at the height of the Corona crisis, and it is completely appropriate even these days, at least politically: “In those days there is no king in Israel – a man right in his own eyes will do.”
“Chair Games”, a summary of the political week in “Shabbat Square”, presented by our correspondent Rafael Cohen.