According to multiple recent polls, support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his government has declined significantly since the most recent election. Haviv Rettig Gur observes, based on more specific survey data, that the prime minister’s problem isn’t that his voters aren’t happy with his government’s stalled attempt at judicial reform, but that his voters care about other issues more:
“What do you think should be the priority of the government?” a Channel 12 poll asked last week. It asked respondents to choose between just two options: the looming “economic crisis”—rising food and gas prices, inflation, etc.—and the “judicial reform.” Nearly three-quarters, 74 percent, said the economy and just 19 percent the judicial reform—a whopping 55-point gap. And when Likud voters were [isolated] from the larger sample, the gap was almost as huge: 69 percent economy, 27 percent judicial reform—a 42-point gap. . . . This doesn’t mean judicial reform isn’t important to right-wing voters, only that it’s deemed less urgent than other issues.
It matters, then, that the government has very publicly neglected nearly every other issue in the four months since the coalition was formed. Entire ministries and vital agencies—welfare, labor, the National Insurance Institute—are still without chief executives. Dozens of important decisions are waiting in the Justice Ministry for minister Yariv Levin’s signature, unable to move forward because his attention is elsewhere.
With less than a month to the deadline for passing a state budget, the budget bill has barely been dealt with in the Knesset. It’s now advancing with major and long-promised reforms—including a streamlining of import regulations that Netanyahu promised in the election campaign would dramatically lower the cost of living—having been removed. The government and the Knesset simply don’t have the time or political bandwidth to deal with them before the budget deadline.
[For a government to collapse], it only takes one coalition party concluding that the government is irredeemably floundering, that it won’t be able to turn things around, and that it’s therefore in its political interest to jump ship and position itself as a critic of the flailing coalition. Everything then unravels very quickly.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/pro-overhaul-protest-showed-the-rights-strengths-and-the-governments-weakness/