What awaits the new government of Israel?

In four months, Israeli citizens will go to the polls for the fifth time in three and a half yearsa new dramatic turn of the screw in the complex local political situation, with several elections that have not yielded a clear majority to form a stable government.

The big question at this time, having dissolved Parliament, is whether after November 1 – the date for the elections – the Israelis will have achieved a clear and conclusive result or not.

The situation reveals three possible scenarios in the face of the political crisis in the country. First, that the sectors that they want former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to reach at least 61 seats (half plus one) and can form a coalition, something that was not achieved in three consecutive elections prior to the last one.

Second, that the side represented in the “change” coalition – today converted into a transitional government – ​​be the majority, in which the common denominator of all its components is the opposition to Netanyahu. But it would be unstable again due to its heterogeneity.

And the third, that a stalemate like the one that followed three elections before the last one that produced the anti-Netanyahu coalition is reached again, and that leads the former prime minister’s Likud party and its partners to decide that they don’t give him another chance.

EL TIEMPO consulted Alberto Spectorovsky, professor of Political Science at Tel Aviv University, who said he was “convinced” that Netanyahu is risking his political life in the November 1 elections.

But until then, there are other challenges on the way. The central ones are those of the new prime minister Yair Lapid, the Chancellor who assumed the head of government at midnight last Thursday, based on the rotation agreement that he had with Naftali Bennett, who now became alternative ‘premier’.

In his first speech, Lapid emphasized the need for unity, evidently striving to put aside differences and emphasizing that what unites Israelis is much more than what separates them.

Now he has four months to convince the public that he deserves it, maneuvering between being the Prime Minister of all and being an adversary of the head of the opposition, Netanyahu.

“In the coming months, our goal, from this entire table, is to run the government as if there were no electoral campaign,” he declared this Sunday morning when leading the government session for the first time as Prime Minister. He spoke about some economic issues and reiterated warnings about Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah.

To all this, the President of the United States Joe Biden arrives in less than two weeks on an official visit to Israel, and it will be Lapid who receives him. An immediate challenge will be to preserve the line achieved by Premier Bennett up to now, of making clear the discrepancies on the issue of the nuclear agreement with Iran, without publicly clashing with the US administration. And that is not certain to be repeated exactly on issues such as the relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Israeli-Palestinian situation.

JANA BERIS
FOR THE TIME
JERUSALEM