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| Israel to hold snap election after Netanyahu coalition talks fail | Israel to hold snap election after Netanyahu coalition talks fail |
| (32 minutes later) | |
| Israel’s parliament has voted to dissolve itself after Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a government, in a move that will lead to a second round of elections just one month after the country held a national poll. | Israel’s parliament has voted to dissolve itself after Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a government, in a move that will lead to a second round of elections just one month after the country held a national poll. |
| At a suspenseful gathering that ended weeks of unsuccessful bartering and brinkmanship, the Knesset voted to disperse and call new elections, set for 17 September. | |
| Coalition talks stalled after far-right former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, a Netanyahu ally-turned-rival, refused to back the prime minister. | Coalition talks stalled after far-right former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, a Netanyahu ally-turned-rival, refused to back the prime minister. |
| Netanyahu needed support from Lieberman’s ultranationalist party, Yisrael Beiteinu, for a majority in Israel’s parliament. | |
| Speaking immediately after the Knesset vote, the prime minister slammed Lieberman. “He has dragged the country to unnecessary elections due to his own political ego,” he said. | |
| “We will run a sharp and clear election campaign and we will win,” he added. | |
| However, it was the prime minister’s Likud party that proposed the idea that parliament disband. In a high-stakes bid to extend his decade-long run in power, Netanyahu pushed this week for another round of elections after it appeared more and more likely that he would not be able to assemble a majority coalition by the cutoff point on midnight on Wednesday local time. | |
| Breaking that deadline – 42 days since the parliamentary election – would have allowed the president, Reuven Rivlin, to assign another politician with the task of forming Israel’s next administration, something Netanyahu has desperately sought to avoid. | |
| Now Netanyahu risks possibly losing a second national vote in September, after his right-wing bloc came out ahead in April, but the plan at least gives him time to regroup and try again. | |
| Israel has never held two elections in a year, and Netanyahu will remain as interim leader until a new government is formed. If he remains in office through July, he will become Israel’s longest-serving leader. | |
| Lieberman, whose party’s base includes largely secular Russian-speaking Israelis, wanted guarantees that the prime minister would back legislation to insist ultra-Orthodox Jews undertake mandatory national service like other Israelis. | |
| Netanyahu, however, also needed the 16 seats from ultra-Orthodox parties for a 61-seat majority of parliament’s 120 seats. Those parties demanded that the existing exemption from conscription for seminary students stays in place. | |
| The deadlock mirrored what happened four years ago, when Netanyahu also struggled to form a coalition right up until the day of the 2015 deadline. At that time, it was also Lieberman who held up the process and over the same issue. | |
| This time, Netanyahu, 69, was under additional pressure to form a government as he faces potential indictments for bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three cases. He denies any wrongdoing, labelling the accusations as a “witch hunt”. | |
| His loyalists had been planning to grant him immunity in the next parliament. A draft law they proposed would overrule court decisions and in effect protect the prime minister, although Netanyahu has not publicly backed the plan. | |
| A new election will complicate US efforts to press ahead with Donald Trump’s peace plan, which has already been rejected by the Palestinian leadership. | |
| They declined to join an economic conference in Bahrain next month, which Washington said would discuss the potential economic incentives of its still-undisclosed vision which Trump has promised would be the “deal of the century”. | |
| It is not clear if the conference will go ahead. Jared Kushner, the peace plan’s architect and Trump’s son-in-law, is currently in the Middle East to garner support. He is due in Jerusalem on Thursday. | |
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