On Wednesday, Israeli news media began reporting, based on an anonymous source within the prime minister’s office, that Benjamin Netanyahu is planning to call elections for this coming November—which, were it to actually happen, would be the fourth election in nineteen months. But even though polls show Netanyahu’s Likud party with a solid lead, writes Haviv Rettig Gur, the same polls show that it would likely be very difficult for him to form a governing coalition. It’s more probable that Netanyahu is simply bluffing, Gur argues:
How will Netanyahu fare in November, by the time election day rolls around, with the economy deeper in the slumps, global trade continuing to decline, hundreds of thousands more Israelis out of work, and a [coronavirus] death toll possibly reaching into the thousands? It’s an exceedingly bad time for Netanyahu to throw those dice.
But it’s still an excellent moment, from the prime minister’s perspective, to threaten elections. Netanyahu is in a bitter running fight with [his main coalition partner], Defense Minister Benny Gantz, over whether to pass a one-year budget law for 2020 or a two-year budget through the end of 2021. . . . Finance Ministry and Bank of Israel officials back a one-year budget law, arguing that the future is too uncertain in the middle of a pandemic to make a two-year budget anything but an exercise in frustration and delay.
But Gantz wants the two-year law promised him in the coalition agreement between Likud and [his own] Blue and White party. Israeli law stipulates that if a Knesset fails to pass a budget, it triggers an election. A two-year law would mean Gantz won’t have to find himself in the spring of 2021 scrambling to pass a new 2021 budget to avoid the automatic triggering of an election. . . . What better argument to convince Gantz to back that one-year budget, Netanyahu must be thinking, than the threat of even more imminent elections?
Yet, as Gur goes on to explain, the unusual tensions between Gantz and Netanyahu—rival leaders of the government—have given the Knesset both an impetus and an opportunity to reassert its authority over the executive branch. And that’s not a bad thing.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/dont-believe-the-hype-about-a-new-election-unless-it-happens/