This story originally appeared on themedialine.org.
Just 20 months after the current government was sworn in, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired two of his top cabinet ministers, leading their parties to pull out of the government and the Knesset, or parliament, to vote to dissolve itself. A new date has already been chosen – March 17 – a few weeks before the Passover holiday.
The Israeli public is not happy about the election. A new poll shows that 57 percent of the public think the elections are unnecessary. Fired Finance Minister Yair Lapid attacked Netanyahu for “dragging the country” into an expensive election, estimated to cost up to $500 million.
“The general feeling is that after the election we’ll have the same government we have now,” Guy Ben Porat, a professor of public policy at Ben Gurion University told The Media Line. “The left are not very hopeful that things will change and people on the right already have power so there’s no great motivation on either side for an election.”
New contenders are already popping up. Popular former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon repeated that he intends to form a new party.
“I arrived at the conclusion that we need a different platform, with its own agenda and own people – innocent people with no foreign interests, professionals who are not afraid to serve people and not power,” he told a group of students in Haifa. Kahlon is well-liked for encouraging competition in the mobile phone market that brought prices down dramatically.
In the previous election, recently-fired Yair Lapid, then a popular television presenter, took the electorate by storm, winning 19 seats in the 120 seat Knesset for his Yesh Atid party and becoming the country’s finance minister. Polls show that Lapid’s party will lose significant support in the next election.
US Secretary of State John Kerry said he hoped Israelis will choose a government that will restart the peace process with the Palestinians.
“We hope that whatever government is formed is a government that will – or whether there are elections, that those elections will produce — the possibility of a government that can negotiate and move towards resolving the differences between Israelis and Palestinians, and obviously, the differences in the region,” he said while speaking Tuesday at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.
Eytan Gilboa, an expert on US-Israeli relations, said Kerry’s statement was a hint to Israelis not to vote for Netanyahu.
“The Obama Administration may retaliate for what they perceive to be Netanyahu’s intervention in the last US Presidential election in the last Presidential election (when Netanyahu openly supported Obama challenger Mitt Romney) and try to influence them here,” Gilboa told The Media Line.
He disagrees with the conventional wisdom that there is no alternative to Netanyahu. He said that a center-left bloc of the two fired cabinet ministers, Yair Lapid and Tzippi Livni, along with the Labor party, headed by Isaac Herzog, could pull in a substantial number of seats.
“If the Obama administration wants to help the center-left bloc they could invite Herzog to the White House,” he said. “The center-left is going to go after Netanyahu for the deterioration in US-Israeli relations.”
Israel’s parliamentary democracy system means that voters choose a party, and the party with the largest number of seats puts together a coalition of at least 61 in the 120-seat Knesset. With the break-up of the former alliance between Netanyahu’s Likud and Yisrael Beytenu headed by Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman there will be more medium sized parties.
“We used to have two big blocs – Likud and Labor,” Gilboa said. “Now we have too many medium sized parties that cannot get more than 20 seats. That is a recipe for instability and frequent elections.”
