The poll suggests that next week’s vote should not break the deadlock, prompting many Israelis to prepare for a fifth election later this year.
“Is Israeli democracy broken, considering what we’ve seen in the past two years?” asked Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. No, he said, it was “defective, but not broken”, and so he gives credit to the public service professionals who kept it up and running.
But if the system is not yet broken, it is deeply dysfunctional.
Parliament did not approve a state budget for 2020 or 2021, despite the extraordinary costs of the pandemic, forcing government agencies to go month by month. Cabinet meetings have been postponed or canceled because of disputes within the coalition, and the cabinet’s approval of critical foreign policy decisions has occasionally been ignored. The main government posts remain unfilled. The Executive Branch is at war with the Judiciary Branch.
And the prime minister, who denies the charges against him and considers the charge to be an attempted coup, is trying to rule the country, even while he is on trial.
For his critics, Netanyahu imprisoned the country in an electoral limbo for one main reason: to win enough seats in Parliament to allow him to change the law and bypass his judicial process.
This time, he is accused of sabotaging budget negotiations to overthrow the coalition government and trigger next week’s elections. The action overturned a power-sharing deal that would have allowed Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s coalition partner, to replace him as prime minister this fall.
The move resembles the one that Netanyahu held three elections ago, in May 2019, when he led an effort to dissolve Parliament and start a new electoral cycle. The action prevented the president, Reuven Rivlin, from giving Gantz the opportunity to try to form a coalition that could have removed Netanyahu from power.