Netanyahu’s Likud has recently become a splintered party, unable to pass votes and with another leadership challenge potentially underway.
Today, Netanyahu’s Likud party lost an important vote over who gets to join the Arrangements Committee, the group that controls the legislative agenda in the absence of a new government. Israel recently had elections but no party had a clear majority so Netanyahu is struggling to put together a coalition and he has just two more weeks to get it sorted. If that wasn’t bad enough, a proposal by Yair Lapid, the Chairman of the opposition Yesh Atid party, did get approved, which gives stronger representation to the anti-Netanyahu bloc.
Likud appears to be beset with problems at the moment. In December 2020, a number of Likud members announced they would be leaving to set up a new party and contesting seats in the upcoming elections. The ‘New Hope’ party is headed up by Gideon Moshe Sa’ar who unsuccessfully ran for the leadership of Likud in 2019. Sa’ar subsequently left the Knesset to set up the New Hope party and a number of Likud members followed suit. New Hope then took 6 of the 120 seats in the Knesset in the recent election.
There appears to be a fair amount of animosity brewing between Likud and the New Hope party at the moment. The young family of one of the MP’s who left Likud and joined the New Hope party, Ze’ev Elkin, appear to have been terrorised by members of the Likud party. The Jerusalem Post reported today that Elkin’s wife had been “verbally accosted by Likud supporters near her home”. Elkin’s wife and children have reportedly suffered repeated abuse from Likud supporters over a number of days now, prompting her husband to tweet.. “For the information of the group of lunatics who came tonight to demonstrate near my house for Netanyahu, frightened my 5-year-old girl, shouted at her that her father was a leftist and a criminal and demanded that my wife go out to them: Thanks for the reminder of what the discourse culture at the home which you call on me to return to looks like today,”
Right wing parties have now also hatched a plan to try and get rid of Netanyahu by passing a reformation plan that would allow a direct elections for the post of Prime Minister. Of course, if it passes, whoever is elected would still have a struggle to pull together a coalition government but, presumably, the hope is that they might have a better mandate.
In any case, on the current trajectory, if Netanyahu fails to form a government in the next 2 weeks we will probably be looking at the 5th election in Israel in 2yrs, or a direct election to vote for the post of prime minister, or potentially some alternative reformation proposals.
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