A broad alliance led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid says it has the votes to form a government and oust Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
Israel’s prime minister has found himself in a precarious position after the country’s opposition leader told President Reuven Rivlin he had succeeded in gaining support for a ‘government of change’. The news, which comes after days of negotiations, means Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could be in danger of losing the position he has held for …
Benjamin Netanyahu has fought back against what he slammed as a “dangerous” coalition of opposition parties that were rushing to establish a government aimed at unseating the country’s longest-serving leader . A day after the opposition head, Yair Lapid, announced that he and Naftali Bennett – his far-right partner and prime minister in waiting – could form a “government of change”, the race was on to get it voted on in parliament and sworn in..
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The Netanyahu era appears to be coming to an end in Israel. Yesh Atid Party leader Yair Lapid announced Wednesday that the change coalition has support to form a government from an extraordinarily broad array of parties, from the ultranationalist settler-oriented Yamina Party, whose leader, Naftali Bennett, would be the coalition s first prime minister (and who will also be the first religiously-observant Orthodox prime minister in Israel s history), to the left-wing Meretz Party. It would also be the first Israeli government supported by an independent Arab party, the Islamist Ra am, led by Mansour Abbas.
That breadth, and the extreme ideological diversity that it implies, is one reason to question the coalition s staying power. But it s also an explicit rebuke to Netanyahu s entire mode of politics. Netanyahu is not the most right-wing figure in Israeli politics Bennett s party is far more extreme in its positions on the territories, for