New government to be voted on Sunday
The Knesset will vote on the 36th government on Sunday, Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin announced Tuesday.
Minister of Education Naftali Bennet at the 15th Jerusalem Conference. Feb 12, 2018. Photo by Hillel Maeir/TPS *
The vote is expected to pass with a slim majority of two votes.
Member of Knesset (MK) Nir Orbach, of the right-wing Yamina party, announced Tuesday he will vote in favour of the government and provide it with the required majority after deliberating on the issue for several days.
Yamina’s leader Naftali Bennett will serve as prime minister for the first two years and Lapid will serve as alternate prime minister, and they will trade off after two years.
Bennett, head of the Yamina (to the Right) party, will head a government comprised of several small left-wing parties and will thus oust Netanyahu and end his 12-year reign.
Bennett, who heads a party of only six MKs, will have to rely on the votes of Arab MKs, some of them from the anti-Zionist Islamist Raam party.
After some 20 years in the political desert, Bennett, a right-winger, will be bringing the extreme left back to power and allowing an Islamist party to participate in the shaping of Israel’s future.
Bennett claimed that the government he heads will focus only on crucial issues and will refrain from addressing ideological contentious issues which are in dispute among his coalition members. However, the coalition agreements that were exposed Monday night show otherwise and touch upon significant issues such as state-religion relations.
The new government will be facing an uphill battle with an experienced opposition, and several pundits believe that the government’s days are already numbered.
