ISRAELI LAWMAKERS DISSOLVE PARLIAMENT
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 rightwing 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 party in Parliament, they also show that his wider rightwing 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 Israel. “I feel I am being forced to vote. I feel I am being held hostage by small and foul-smelling politics.”
The vote cements Israel’s status as one of the world’s most turbulent democracies. Since Netanyahu was first elected in 1996, Israel has held an election every 2.4 years — a more frequent rate than any other established parliamentary democracy, according to data compiled by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group.