Parties that represent 67 Knesset members recommended Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister to President Reuven Rivlin. Netanyahu now has the task of turning these members of Knesset into a functioning coalition. What are Netanyahu’s options? If he and Labor leader Yitzhak Herzog can’t pull a huge surprise out of the hat and form a unity coalition — and this doesn’t seem likely to happen, but you never say never in politics — his best option is to form a coalition of, well, 67.
What are the main obstacles to forming such a coalition? Everyone wants to be a minister, everybody wants to be important — and Netanyahu needs to please them all. Or else.
He also needs to do it while keeping an eye on a weary world and a weary President Barack Obama that are less than happy about Israel’s choice.
Netanyahu’s goal: A government with capable ministers, not too kooky, cohesive and long lasting. He wants a government like the one he had in his second term, from 2009 to 2013, possibly including someone from the outside to be its leftist marker. Ehud Barak was that “someone” in 2009, but Barak had a party. The 2015 Netanyahu — if he really wants such person to join in — would have to find someone without a party, like Prime Minister Menachem Begin did when he asked Moshe Dayan to become his foreign minister.
Netanyahu’s problems: Every party can shake his government (in theory he can live without one of the six-seat parties, but then his coalition would be reduced to a 61-member coalition, too small to rely on). Thus, every head of party might conclude that he can ask for more power and more senior portfolios. Avigdor
Lieberman says he wants to be defense minister. Naftali Bennett wants to be foreign minister. Moshe Kahlon wants to be finance minister. If Netanyahu says yes, yes and yes, he has nothing left for his own Likud Party — the party that actually won the election. He also has a problem with the rest of the world.
Netanyahu’s advantage: He won the election, and political leaders respect victory. Plus: all parties can make demands, but at the end of the day, they have no real alternative. If Netanyahu says no, he might not have a coalition, but they also wouldn’t have anywhere to go. There is no other viable alternative to a Netanyahu coalition. If the partners make demands that the PM can’t accommodate, he will be forced into either working harder for unity — in that case the partners lose power, going immediately for another round of election while asking the public not to give power to the parties that made the outrageous demands. Surely, this is a risky move for everybody, one that they’d all want to avoid. So the delicate negotiation game is going to be about demanding as much as possible without being seen by the public as unreasonable.
The parties all have issues to solve that complicate the forming of the next coalition.
Likud: the party won the election, and the party wants more portfolios and more power. Netanyahu will not be able to satisfy everyone, but he was always smart enough to keep his “base” happy, knowing that the base is what keeps you up or sends you down.
Kahlon: The man truly wants to be finance minister — if he doesn’t get it, he might not come (and Netanyahu has already offered him the job).
Lieberman: He is erratic, and might be serious when he demands to be defense minister or, as a second-best choice, to keep the foreign ministry under his belt. With six seats, that is what you’d call chutzpah.
Shas: They will not be a problem as long as Aryeh Deri is allowed to return to the scene of the crime and become interior minister. The public might not like it — and the courts might not like it as well.
UTJ: Not a huge problem. All it wants is its usual positions — health ministry and finance committee — and the joy of dismantling piece by piece everything Yair Lapid did.
Bennett: His narrative is somewhat pathetic: We lost seats so that Netanyahu would win — we “sacrificed” for Netanyahu and hence we deserve a consolation prize for our eager eight seats. Of course, Jewish Home did not “sacrifice” — it was robbed by Netanyahu. And in politics there are no consolation prizes, just power plays. Can Bennett, who really has no alternative, be able to get from Netanyahu as much as Kahlon (who might have an alternative, at least in theory) can get? Will Netanyahu feel obliged to please the religious-Zionist voters who abandoned Bennett at the last minute to save his skin — and the right-wing camp with it?
