Israel faces new vote as Netanyahu falters
Print Edition
Israeli lawmakers voted to dissolve parliament yesterday, paving the way for a new election after veteran Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition government before a midnight deadline.
Netanyahu preferred a new ballot, set for September 17, to the alternative, under which President Reuven Rivlin could have asked another politician to try and form a ruling coalition.
But the need to go the polls again so soon after a closely fought April 9 election in which Netanyahu had claimed victory showed a new weakness in a leader who has been in power for the past decade. Potential indictments in three corruption cases have only deepened questions about his political survival.
鈥淲e will win,鈥 Netanyahu, 69, head of the right-wing Likud Party, vowed after parliament voted when the deadline expired for him to assemble his fifth government.
However, he was looking over his shoulder at the Likud benches during the vote in what some commentators interpreted as concern about any last-minute revolt. Not a single Likud lawmaker wavered in voting for an election.
The crisis arose 鈥 officially, at least 鈥 from a feud over military conscription between Netanyahu鈥檚 presumed allies: ex-defense minister and far-right secularist Avigdor Lieberman, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties. Those parties want young religious scholars exempted from mandatory national service. But Lieberman and many other Israelis say they should share the burden.
Faced with the prospect of having to quit at the end of a 42-day post-election period allowed for putting together a government, Netanyahu instead drummed up support to dissolve the Knesset.
He cast Lieberman, a settler in the occupied West Bank, as a leftist for effectively blocking the creation of a right-wing administration and said his erstwhile ally had been out to topple him. In a dig that may foreshadow election campaign attack lines, Lieberman retorted that he lives in a settlement, whereas Netanyahu has a home in a Mediterranean beachfront suburb.
First elected in the late 1990s, Netanyahu will overtake Israel鈥檚 founding father David Ben-Gurion in July as Israel鈥檚 longest-serving premier.
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