Israeli shakeup prompts another election

JERUSALEM — Israeli lawmakers voted to dissolve Parliament on Thursday, collapsing the government, installing a caretaker prime minister and sending an exhausted electorate to a fifth election in less than four years.

The vote will give Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing former prime minister and current opposition leader, a chance to regain power. But while polls suggest that Netanyahu’s party, Likud, will remain the largest in Parliament, they also show that his wider right-wing alliance could still struggle to form a majority coalition — prolonging Israel’s political stalemate and raising the likelihood of another election in 2023.

Netanyahu is currently on trial for corruption, and his fitness for office is likely to again frame the election, set for Nov. 1, as a referendum on his character.

Israel will be led through the election campaign by an interim prime minister, Yair Lapid, a centrist broadcaster turned lawmaker, who was scheduled to take over at midnight Thursday. Lapid succeeds the right-wing prime minister, Naftali Bennett, who resigned in accordance with a pact sealed between the two men when they formed an alliance to replace Netanyahu in June 2021.

The campaign is expected to sharpen a debate about the role of both the Jewish farright camp in Israel and the country’s Arab minority within governing coalitions.

Lapid enters office at a delicate time, with President Joe Biden scheduled to visit Israel, the West Bank and Saudi Arabia in mid-July.

The return to the ballot box, for the fifth time since April 2019, was greeted with frustration by many voters.

“I have no energy to vote again,” said Maya Kleinman, 45, a biologist in the city of Rehovot in central Israel. “I feel I am being held hostage by small and foul-smelling politics.”