Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara must instruct the Finance Ministry to freeze coalition funds for the 2024 state budget, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel (MQG) urged in a letter to her, the Finance Ministry’s legal counsel, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich.
Following the passing of the amended 2023 budget last week, which included coalition funds for needs that were not related to the war, MQG wrote that there was a risk that the government would do the same for next year’s budget.
As such, the NGO asked Baharav-Miara to make it clear to the government that the freezing of coalition funds in October was still valid and applied to 2024’s budget as well.
The reception of the letter
The letter drew the recipients’ attention to a letter published by Baharav-Miara’s deputy Meir Levin in November in which he wrote that “the funds that were intended for political uses, which haven’t been used yet, are a budgetary source to fund needs that arise from the war.”
In the same vein, the attorney-general was also asked to ensure that the government re-legislates the 2024 budget as soon as possible and make it clear to the government that it may not take advantage of the in-between period for a “flash-allocation of political funds intended for 2024 to prevent them being redirected.”
Copies of the letter were also sent to members of the Knesset’s Finance Committee, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Minister Benny Gantz.
“MQG claimed a while ago that the bi-annual budget was not only damaging to democracy but also lacking in any financial sense; this is the reason we petitioned against it in a petition which is still open at the High Court of Justice,” the NGO’s head of its Economic Division said.
“The events of the last few months proved that the existing budget is not relevant at all and that a change in priorities is greatly needed.”