Israel heads for its fourth election in less than two years

The political situation in Israel is becoming increasingly complicated. At the beginning of December, Benny Gantz, the current defence minister and leader of the Blue and White Party, announced that he would vote in favour of dissolving the Israeli parliament, as the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was unable to approve the budgets, a clause that was in the government agreement between the two parties.

The Israelis have already had to go to the polls on three occasions in the past two years, and it seems that the possibility of holding a fourth election is becoming increasingly evident. The budgets still cannot be approved, and this morning the Israeli Parliament (Knesset) voted against the bill that attempted to extend the deadline for approving them. This result means that the House must be dissolved at midnight this Tuesday, taking Israel to its fourth general elections in two years.

The bill that was accepted on Monday proposed postponing the deadline for the approval of the 2020 Budget from December 23 to 31, and with this to be able to count on one more week to reach the necessary agreements to be able, at last, to bring the budget forward.

Negotiations aimed at achieving a budgetary compromise between the two main government parties were interrupted on Tuesday and in a night session of the Knesset, members of the Likud and Blue and White parties voted against a proposal to postpone the deadline. The measure failed by 49 votes to 47.

Although the majority of the Likud and the Blue and White voted in favour of the extension, several MPs from both parties were either opposed to it or absent, which made it easier for it not to go through. The Prime Minister wrote on his Twitter: "We do not want elections and we voted against them tonight, but we are not afraid of elections, because we are going to win". But it is obvious that exhaustion within the governing parties themselves has led some of their members to vote against extending the deadline.

This has been one of the main clashes within the coalition, as the government pact established that a two-year budget should be approved, yet Netanyahu demanded that only the 2020 budget be pushed through. This demand may be considered a strategy on Netanyahu's part that would enable him to have the dissolution of the Knesset in hand before having to transfer the head of government to Gantz in November 2021.

That same Monday Gantz presented Netanyahu with five demands in the last round of negotiations, and stated that if the latter did not agree to include them, "we will go to elections". If the government fails to approve the budget before midnight tonight, Israeli law stipulates that the Knesset must be dissolved and new elections marked within the next 90 days. Most of the ways to evade this deadline have been exhausted.

If these predictions come true, the Israelis will go to the polls in March 2021 in the midst of a severe economic crisis sponsored by COVID-19, with political fatigue increasingly exacerbated among the population and while Netanyahu is on trial for a series of corruption charges.

Netanyahu is also facing an opponent from his own side, Gideon Saar, who broke away from the Likud party earlier this month and has called for the prime minister's dismissal, arguing that he has been in power for a long time.