Even the harshest detractors of long-serving Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu admit that he is a master of the complex coalition politics that are always necessary to form, then maintain in power, any Israeli government.
However, the new government he formed on Wednesday, uniting his Likud party with a coalition of far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, will test his political skills to the fullest.
Under Israel’s pure proportional representation system, no party has ever managed to gain a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats. All governments are coalitions of often-disputatious parties, whose demands must constantly be managed. Netanyahu’s record of doing so is as good as anyone’s.
Yet this new coalition will likely be harder to manage than any of the five he has led previously.
This government’s mandate is narrow. The Israeli right won a bare majority of the popular vote, driven in part by voter weariness over five inconclusive elections since 2019 and by a wave of Palestinian terrorism this year, as well as fear prompted by the unprecedented violence by Arab residents against Jewish neighbours in mixed Israeli towns during the war with Hamas in May last year.
Also, in all previous coalitions, Netanyahu has tried to include at least one party to his left, thus positioning himself as the government’s moderate centre. This time he was not able to do this because many parties reject serving with him after he was indicted on corruption charges.
Read the article by Tzvi Fleischer in The Australian.