JERUSALEM, Jun 21 (NNN-PNA) – Israel’s fragile coalition government, will vote to dissolve parliament next week, announced Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office, yesterday, sending the country to its fifth elections in three years.
Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett and his main coalition partner, Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid decided to present a bill to dissolve parliament, next Monday, the office said in a statement.
Once the parliament approves the bill, Lapid, leader of the centrist party of Yesh Atid, will rotate with Bennett and serves as interim prime minister, until the next government is established.
The elections are expected to take place in Oct, Israel’s state-owned Kan TV news reported.
“Citizens of Israel, we stand before you today, in a difficult moment, but with the understanding that we have made the right decision for the people of Israel,” Bennett said in a joint statement alongside Lapid, which was broadcast live on the country’s main TV channels.
Bennett noted that, he and Lapid decided on the move, in the wake of their failure to pass regulations, that provides protections to Jewish settlers, in the occupied West Bank.
The regulations will expire at the end of Jun, but the opposition, mostly composed of pro-settler parties, voted against a government-sponsored bill to extend them, in order to force the coalition to resign.
Bennett, leader of the pro-settler party of Yamina, said, he held a series of consultations with judicial and security officials on Friday, that made him realise that the expiration of the regulation will create “horrible damages.”
He said, the coalition “left no stone unturned” in an attempt to raise enough votes to pass the bill in parliament, but the efforts were “fruitless.”
Bennett and Lapid have struggled to keep together the shaky coalition of eight parties, since its establishment last year, but a series of defections left it without a majority in parliament for more than two months.
Last week, Nir Orbach, a lawmaker with Bennett’s Yamina party, announced he was resigning from the coalition because it had failed in “lifting Israelis’ spirits.”
After his leave, the coalition was left with only 59 seats in the 120-seat parliament. Other lawmakers also threatened to rebel.
Bennett’s coalition was inaugurated in Jun, 2021, after a string of inconclusive elections. It is made of parties with diverse ideologies, including pro-settler nationalists and dovish parties, united only with the goal of ousting longtime leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.
The move threw a political lifeline to Bennett’s predecessor, Netanyahu, who is now the leader of the opposition and facing a criminal trial over corruption charges.
The leader of the right-wing Likud party celebrated the fall of the government, saying that, he and his opposition colleagues “struggled for a year” to topple the government.
