Israel set for November election as parliament dissolves
GOOBJOOG NEWS|JERUSALEM: Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, has voted to dissolve itself and send the country to the polls in November for the fifth time in less than four years.
The vote, held on Thursday, means that Yair Lapid, Israel’s foreign minister and architect of the outgoing coalition government, will become the country’s caretaker prime minister just after midnight on Friday.
He will be the 14th person to hold that office, taking over from Naftali Bennett, Israel’s shortest serving prime minister.
New elections will be held on November 1.
The move brings a formal end to a year-long experiment in which eight parties from across Israel’s political spectrum tried to find common ground after a period of prolonged political gridlock in which the country held four elections in two years.
The upcoming elections are an extension of Israel’s protracted political crisis, at the heart of which sits former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ongoing corruption trial. The four deadlocked elections in the previous three years were largely referendums on Netanyahu’s fitness to serve while facing charges of accepting bribes, fraud and breach of trust. Netanyahu, who heads the biggest party in Israel’s parliament, the right-wing Likud, has denied any wrongdoing.
Lapid, a former talk-show host who heads the centrist Yesh Atid party, is expected to campaign as caretaker prime minister to keep the job as the main alternative to Netanyahu, and will likely get an early boost when he welcomes United States President Joe Biden to the country next month.
Polls by Israeli media show Netanyahu and his allies gaining seats, although it is unclear whether they would have enough to form a 61-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset. If neither he nor anyone else succeeds in doing so, Israel could go to elections yet again.
Wednesday, Bennett said he would be taking a hiatus from politics and would not be running in the upcoming elections. His Yamina party was riven by infighting and splintered following the formation of the government last year as its members broke away in protest of what they considered Bennett’s excessive compromises to more liberal coalition allies.
AlJazeera English