As Chaos Reigns, Netanyahu Must Carefully Weigh Whether He Really Wants an Election

It’s a month before the deadline for approving the state budget in the Knesset – and at the Finance Ministry the lights are off. The number crunchers are away on a kind of paid vacation. The negotiations with cabinet members, which should be hectic, have altogether ceased.

This is on orders from above, until it’s determined what kind of budget this will be – for two or three months, which is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants, or for 14 months, as his partner in the unity government, Benny Gantz, demands.

This week the two haven’t discussed this at all. They met and decided on an addition to the defense budget. Health? What’s the rush?

“From the outset we saw no possibility of passing a budget by August 25,” a top Finance Ministry official said this week. “We were thinking the end of September, even the end of October.”

Without a budget – or legislation that will postpone the deadline – Israel will be flung into a general election. Yes, just like a rag doll, as President Reuven Rivlin so aptly put it – an election for the fourth time in a year and a half.

But this time it would be with a terrifying twist: an election during a pandemic, which, according to the prevailing forecast, is expected to get worse in the fall and winter, with all the knock-on effects on the health system and worsening economy.

Netanyahu isn’t 100 percent sure about holding an election at the end of 2020 – not because he cares about the country but because he’s far from convinced he’ll obtain the outcome that has evaded him three times: 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.

That magic number would let him form a dream government, purely right-wing and ultra-Orthodox. It would let him regain control of the Justice Ministry, fire the attorney general and replace him with a dangerous sycophant who would delay his corruption trial or concoct a plea bargain. (He should have a look at the opinion poll results I discuss below, which make clear just how elusive his fantasy is).