Is the end of the Netanyahu era approaching?

Against the clock and barely half an hour before the deadline for reaching an agreement to form a government in Israel, the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, called the president of the Hebrew country, Reuven Rivlin, to tell him the news that an agreement had been reached to put an end to the 12 years of government of the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

It has been weeks of long meetings and tough negotiations that have finally resulted in an agreement that still seems fragile. Once the opposition leader has realised that a coalition agreement exists, it has to be put to a vote in parliament (Knesset), where for now it has a narrow 61 seats out of 120. This new government, in addition to ousting the eternal Netanyahu from the prime minister's seat, counts for the first time in history with a party representing the Arab minority among its ranks.

Mansour Abbas, leader of the Arab Raam party, has been in contact with both Netanyahu's Likud party and Yamina's Bennet and Yesh Atid's Lapid, finally opting for the coalition agreement with the self-styled 'bloc of change'. The two major requirements imposed by the Islamists were the legalisation of irregular Bedouin villages in the south of the country and the reversal or suspension of a law that facilitates the demolition of illegal housing, the vast majority of which affects the Arab population. Once these two major issues were agreed, Abbas offered his support to the new government.

Another major obstacle to reaching this agreement has been the Judicial Affairs Committee, which has been a struggle between the Labour Party and Yamina's party. Both Yamina's party's number two, Ayelet Shaked, and Labour's leader Merav Michaeli, wanted to be part of it. In the end, the coalition agreement has solved the problem by establishing a rotating seat. According to the agreement, Shaked would sit on the committee in the first half of the legislature, along with a Labour MP, and Michaeli in the second half, along with an MP from New Hope (another of the coalition parties). 

So once all obstacles are overcome, the Bennet-Lapid government would have the backing of eight of the 13 parties that won seats in the 23 March elections, for an apparent total of 61 votes in the 120-member Knesset: Yesh Atid (17 seats), Blue and White (8), Yisrael Beytenu (7), Labour (7), Yamina (6), New Hope (6), Meretz (6) and Raam (4).

According to the coalition agreement of this heterogeneous government, which includes political parties from all ideological spheres; from the far right, right, centre, left and an Arab party; Bennett (Yamina) will be prime minister until September 2023, when Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid will replace him until the end of the Knesset legislature in November 2025.

While the leader of Yamina serves as prime minister, Lapid will serve as foreign minister, Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz will remain as defence minister, and the treasury portfolio will be held by Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman. New Hope leader Gideon Saar will become Justice Minister, while Yamina's Ayelet Shaked will become Interior Minister.

Labour's Michaeli was given the transport portfolio and her party colleague Omer Barlev will be public security minister. Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz will be appointed Minister of Health, while his party colleague Tamar Zandberg will be Minister of Environmental Protection and Issawi Frej will be Minister of Regional Cooperation.

This is how the new "Government of Change", which still faces a few decisive days before the vote in parliament, is finally distributed. The slim majority obtained by this new coalition could mean that it could crack at any moment. The vote in parliament could take up to 12 days, with a deadline of 14 June. This is a period of time that the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could take advantage of to destabilise some of the right-wing MPs and provoke the break-up of this new government.

Both Lapid and Bennet are aware that these weeks could be decisive and that any eventuality could mean the breakdown of the coalition agreement. Moreover, Yamina's deputy, Nir Orbach, has already shown his reluctance to vote in favour of this new government, which would mean that the necessary majority of 61 seats in Parliament could not be achieved. Orbach would thus follow in the footsteps of another Yamina member, Amichai Shikli, who has already announced that he would vote against "being part of a government with the left".

In order to speed up the process, the "Executive of Change" has presented an initiative to replace the Speaker of the Knesset, Yariv Levin, of Likud, with Mickey Levy, a Yesh Atid supporter (Lapid's party), in order to prevent the Speaker of Parliament from delaying the vote to approve the new government, which would put an end to Netanyahu's 12-year term in office. But to achieve this goal a majority of MPs is again needed, and it is again Yamina member Nir Orbach who has denied his support for this initiative. The vote could therefore be delayed until 14 June, a time that Netanyahu can use to put pressure on the more right-wing spheres of the coalition.

According to The Times of Israel, Netanyahu has called an emergency meeting with the leaders of the parties that form part of the right-wing-ultra-orthodox bloc that support him in Parliament, a meeting to which Levin, the Speaker of the Knesset, has been invited. These last decisive days could mark the end of two years of political deadlock or a new political failure, the most likely outcome of which will be a fifth election in barely two and a half years.