Calling elections at the start of December, having fired his finance minister and his justice minister, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the people of Israel. “You, the citizens of Israel,” he told us all, “deserve a new, better, more stable government, a broad-based government that can govern.”
The 61-strong coalition Netanyahu finalized 90 minutes before his time ran out on Wednesday night can be called many things. Narrow, fragile, and right-wing-Orthodox come readily to mind. “Stable” and “broad-based” certainly do not.
I was hoping we wouldn’t find ourselves with such a right-wing-Orthodox coalition but perhaps it is only a matter of time before it collapses and the country shifts back towards a more sustainable center? I’m just guessing at that, though.
On the plus side all of these elections point to a working democracy (not necessarily functional without much longer term stability, but working in the sense that the system operates).
Image credit: Prime Minister and Defense Minister at Weaponry Display by the Israel Defense Forces, licensed CC BY-NC 2.0
What do you think?