Apparent Israeli election winner Benjamin Netanyahu has until midnight tonight to cobble together a 61 seat majority in the Knesset before Israeli President Reuven Rivlin has to give somebody else a crack at the job. It appears that he’s scrambling to meet the deadline:
Mr. Netanyahu, who exulted in what looked like a strong mandate for a fourth term after the March 17 elections, instead was scrambling to form a coalition with the slimmest possible majority in Parliament. Many analysts said such a coalition would be able to do little and would be unlikely to last long.
Israeli news organizations reported on Wednesday that Mr. Netanyahu had yielded to Jewish Home’s demand for the Justice Ministry, which the party could use to weaken the Supreme Court, emphasize Israel’s Jewishness and restrict leftist advocacy groups.
It seemed, coming out of March’s elections, like Netanyahu had a pretty easy path to a 67 seat majority, but that plan came crashing down a couple of days ago when (now former) Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced that he and his 6 seat Yisrael Beiteinu party would go into opposition rather than join up with Netanyahu again. Yisrael Beiteinu saw its numbers in the Knesset (and with them, Lieberman’s influence in the government) collapse from 15 to 6 in the elections, and it’s likely that he chose to leave the coalition rather than be a very junior partner in the new government.
Lieberman’s move leaves Netanyahu barely scraping together a 61 seat majority, which is virtually untenable insofar as it means that literally every one of those 61 ministers can now play kingmaker in the new coalition and muck around with almost any vote Netanyahu wants to take. Not only can Netanyahu not afford to lose any more parties in this situation, he can’t even afford to lose a single minister. Here we find the reason Netanyahu is struggling to get to 61 by midnight, because Jewish Home’s Naftali Bennett is taking advantage of his weakness and playing maximum hardball. He’s demanding control of at least the Justice Ministry, and possibly Justice and the Foreign Ministry, in exchange for he and his 8 seats joining the coalition. Without Jewish Home, Netanyahu’s coalition sits at 53 seats and, thus, is no coalition at all.
Now, this could be a big game of chicken, with Lieberman pulling out at the last minute to wring some big concession out of Netanyahu before joining the coalition again, but let’s assume it’s not since there’s been no indication otherwise. Netanyahu could reach out to the main opposition party, the Zionist Union, to form a national unity government. He’s reportedly considered that anyway, fearing that even his 67 seat majority would be too hard right, particularly when it comes to trying to improve relations with Washington and with the EU. But whatever talks have gone on between Netanyahu and ZU leader Isaac Herzog have apparently gotten nowhere, and now Herzog can be even more demanding.
Netanyahu could tell Bennett and his 8 ministers to go f themselves, but he’d likely cost himself the prime ministership in the process. Rivlin will likely go to Herzog next, and he’s actually got a harder path to 61 seats, so it’s unclear how that could work. If Herzog can’t form a governing coalition, Rivlin has to go to a third candidate, which could be the Arab Joint List’s Ayman Odeh, whose party finished third in the elections. There’s no chance Odeh could put together a coalition, but that whole scenario would be pretty hysterical if you ask me. More likely than Odeh, and maybe even than Herzog, getting a shot at the job is the possibility that Rivlin (who is himself Likud) will ask another member of Likud (or possibly Kulanu Party leader Moshe Kahlon, who recently split from Likud but still has support there), who doesn’t have Netanyahu’s personal baggage, to try to form a coalition. If nobody can get the job done within three tries, then I’m pretty sure Rivlin is required to call for new elections.
But even if Netanyahu gives in to Bennett and forms a 61 seat government, it’s highly unlikely to last very long for the reasons I described above, plus the fact that this ultra-right government will likely create even more tension in the already tense Israel-US and Israel-EU relationships. And that means new Israeli elections are likely coming soon, one way or another, and Netanyahu will be going into them after suffering a pretty big public embarrassment in that he was unable to form a stable coalition.
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