JERUSALEM, Israel
Israelis are back at the polls to vote in parliamentary elections for the fifth time in just three and a half years, with the race expected to be close between supporters of opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponents.
It is unlikely, however, that
either side will be able to command a large majority in the 120-seat
parliament, with pre-election polls predicting a tight race.
Voting started at 7am local
time (05:00 GMT) on Tuesday and will carry on until 10pm, giving the nearly 6.8
million people who have the right to vote plenty of opportunity to cast their
vote.
“Is it the fourth or the fifth
or the sixth election – I can’t keep track,” Yochi Hadad-Klapholtz, a mother of
three in Jerusalem, told Al Jazeera, highlighting the dysfunctional nature of
Israeli politics in the past few years.
The elections are the result
of the collapse of the previous government and the dissolution of parliament in
June after defections from the governing coalition made former Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett’s position untenable.
That coalition, currently led
by Yair Lapid, was formed by an unlikely combination of parties with
conflicting views on everything from state and religion to the Israeli
occupation and Palestinian
statehood, LGBTQ rights, and economic policies.
What has united them was their
fierce opposition to Netanyahu, who had served as prime minister for 12 years
and is on trial for alleged bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Benjamin Netanyahu |
In the previous election, held
in March 2021, he midwifed a joint slate between two far-right Jewish
politicians, which helped one of them, Itamar Ben Gvir, to get into the
parliament, also known as the Knesset.
The other, Bezalel Smotrich,
was already in parliament.
Smotrich has promised to
legislate the removal of the offence of fraud and breach of trust from the
criminal code if Netanyahu becomes prime minister.
He and Ben Gvir have also
promised to strip the High Court of Justice of its ability to strike down
unconstitutional laws. Ben Gvir plans to legislate a bill that would
potentially expel Palestinian citizens of Israel not deemed “loyal” to the
state.
Polls have suggested that
Netanyahu’s far-right bloc may get 60 seats, with Lapid’s on 56.
The remaining four seats are
expected to go to the Hadash-Ta’al Palestinian slate, which will only back
Lapid if he agrees to certain conditions, including repealing the Jewish
Nation-State Law, which enshrines Jewish supremacy over Palestinian citizens of
Israel, and repealing the Kaminitz Law, which severely penalises Palestinian
citizens of Israel for unauthorised construction and increases home
demolitions.
In what might be a gesture
towards the Hadash-Ta’al faction, Lapid said last week he intends to amend the
contentious Jewish Nation-State Law.
Israel’s electoral system is
based on nation-wide proportional representation, and the number of seatrs
every list receives in the Knesset is proportional to the number of people who
voted for it.
The only limitation is the
qualifying threshold of 3.25 percent of the total votes, the equivalent of four
seats.
Three of the parties opposing
Netanyahu, the Zionist left-wing Meretz party, the conservative Islamic
Ra’am party and Hadash-Ta’al, may struggle to pass the threshold, leaving Lapid
with no hope of forming a government. - Aljazeera
No comments:
Post a Comment