Gantz’s Path to Leading Israel Must Overcome Bad Blood
Gantz’s Path to Leading Israel Must Overcome Bad Blood
(Bloomberg) -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t get the first chance to form Israel’s next government, but don’t write his political obituary just yet.
Former military chief Benny Gantz, who has been running for a year to unseat Netanyahu, was assigned by President Reuven Rivlin on Monday to build a coalition after being endorsed by 61 lawmakers, a majority of parliament. While that was enough to give Gantz a head start, the coronavirus outbreak and bad blood in the anti-Netanyahu camp might trip him up.
Gantz, like Netanyahu himself, doesn’t have a clear path to forming a majority government after the third election in less than a year delivered yet another stalemate in March. Two alternatives would be to seat a minority government that would rest on the support of the Joint List of Arab parties -- an unprecedented solution -- or to share power with Netanyahu’s Likud party, something the general has balked at doing while the indicted prime minister is at its head.
“Does Gantz have the political savvy, the kind of popular backing, the X factor, which would propel him into the place that the numbers put him? No,” said Dan Avnon, chairman of Hebrew University’s political science department.
The road to a minority government would be troubled because it would mean cooperation among lawmakers who loathe each other. Some members of Gantz’s own Blue and White bloc and former Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman’s seven-seat Yisrael Beytenu vehemently object to serving in a government that would rely on the Joint List to keep it afloat by voting with it in parliament. They are nationalist lawmakers and want to partner with Zionist parties.
The Joint List has its own serious reservations.
“I don’t see a possibility that we could back from outside a government in which Liberman is a part,” said Joint List lawmaker Yousef Jabareen. Liberman has a history of invective and initiatives against Israel’s one-fifth Arab minority, and particularly its leaders.
With these kinds of strains, “it all leads to some kind of arrangement between Blue and White, and Likud, in one form or another,” Avnon predicted.
The coronavirus outbreak has shifted political dynamics by giving Netanyahu a stage to perform as a tested leader who can act decisively. The high marks he’s earned propelled him to call for an emergency hookup with Gantz’s bloc, at least initially under his own leadership; Netanyahu’s party won the most lawmakers in the March 2 vote.
The prime minister’s newly enhanced stature won’t be hurt by the start of his own corruption trial. A close ally, the justice minister, placed the courts on emergency footing -- ostensibly over the virus -- and the proceedings that were to have begun on Tuesday have been delayed to late May.
Gantz, who will have 42 days to try to piece together a coalition, wasn’t sounding too conciliatory toward Netanyahu as he assumed the task.
He assailed “the current prime minister’s illegitimate attempts to try to evade justice,” and warned that “whoever shall try to raise his hand against Israel’s Jewish and democratic government will bring about his own political and public end.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ivan Levingston in Tel Aviv at ilevingston@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lin Noueihed at lnoueihed@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Mark Williams
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