Israel staves off new elections by approving first budget in three years

Exhausted lawmakers whooped and hugged following the final passage of massive funding plan by a two-vote margin at 5:30 a.m.

“A holiday for the State of Israel,” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett exalted in a tweet.

Bennett’s fractious coalition of rival parties had faced a deadline of Nov. 14 to approve a 2021 budget or be automatically dissolved. Recent infighting among coalition members, who include right-wing, centrist, liberal and Arab lawmakers, had prompted speculation that Israel’s governing crisis would continue with the fifth national election since 2019.

Instead, Bennett hailed a return to normality.

“After years of chaos, we formed a government. We overcame [the delta coronavirus variant]. And now, God willing, we have brought a budget to Israel,” he wrote.

After adjourning for a few hours of sleep, the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, is scheduled to take up a 2022 budget later Thursday. It, too, has cleared preliminary hurdles and is expected to be formally adopted.

Analysts had warned that Israeli governance was going further adrift with each passing month without a budget. Department funding has been largely frozen and long-range planning at a standstill even as the country faced the pandemic, an economic downturn and shifting military challenges around the region. On the eve of the vote, Israel’s central bank urged lawmakers to act, emphasizing the “tremendous economic importance” of the moment.

But for the right-wing parties that lost power last summer, derailing the budget was their best chance to fulfill Netanyahu’s pledge to “be back soon.” The long-serving prime minister has been criticized for allowing the budget process to falter for years as he clung to office. Most recently, he blocked action on the budget in late 2020, leading to new elections.

Now the leader of the formal opposition, Netanyahu has worked for weeks to derail the new government’s budget efforts. In tweets, rallies and interviews, he belittled Bennett — his one-time protege — and painted the spending measures as a giveaway to the rich and a menace to Israel’s Jewish majority.

He highlighted the role of the coalition’s one party representing Palestinian citizens of Israel, Ra’am, as a risk to Israel’s security, even though Netanyahu himself had publicly courted the party’s leader as a potential partner before elections in March.

He called the budget’s $9 billion boost in infrastructure spending for Israel’s Arab communities an “Abbas tax” on ordinary Israelis, referring to the party’s leader. His allies went so far as to describe Ra’am as the political wing of Hamas, the Islamist militant group that governs the Gaza Strip.

Netanyahu and members of Likud party in recent weeks ramped up their efforts to woo coalition members over to their camp, reportedly offering them plum roles in the new right-wing government that could arise if the budget failed and new elections were called. Netanyahu continued the efforts until the last moment, according to Israeli media reports, buttonholing individual members overnight as the voting continued.

In the end, all 61 members of the coalition voted to approve the budget.