Senior Blue and White leaders believe no chance to pass 2021 budget
Should the 2021 budget be approved, Netanyahu would be practically unable to avoid handing over the premiership to Gantz in October 2021.
By JEREMY SHARONIsraeli parliament members vote at the Finance committee, during a vote on the 2017-2018 state budget, at the Knesset, the israeli parliament in Jerusalem on December 19, 2016.(photo credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH90)
Senior figures in Blue and White believe there is almost no chance that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud will agree to pass the 2021 budget by the December 23 deadline, meaning new elections are imminent.Trust between the two parties is at a nadir, and news of Blue and White’s loss of hope in passing a budget and averting elections comes after it was reported on Friday that it had been plotting to make Moshe Ya’alon, head of the Telem Party and a former Likud senior minister, a temporary prime minister in order to oust Netanyahu.Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz’s party has demanded that the 2021 budget be passed together with what will now be a retroactive budget for 2020, as required in the coalition agreement. Netanyahu has balked at this step.Should the 2021 budget be approved, Netanyahu likely would be unable to avoid handing over the premiership to Gantz next October.A deadline for passing a budget was missed in August with legislation postponing it until December 23. But the Likud has insisted on passing only the 2020 budget and then the 2021 budget in March, while Blue and White is demanding that both budgets be passed together.Should a budget for 2021 not be presented to the government and passed on to the Knesset by the beginning of November, then “new options will be examined,” a source in Blue and White said Sunday. The source alluded to the possibility of passing laws that prevent Netanyahu from serving again as prime minister if an anti-Netanyahu majority in Knesset is obtainable.“We have a clear ultimatum that if a budget is not presented soon, we will examine other options,” the source said.Although the deadline for passage of the 2021 budget is December 23, it usually takes at least six weeks to pass the budget legislation through the Knesset, meaning that this process would need to start near the beginning of November to make the deadline.Separately, the convoluted process of appointing the heads of the Zionist “national institutions” took another turn when the chairman of the World Board of Trustees of Keren Hayesod-United Israel Appeal denounced the recent agreement to end the tenure of current Keren Hayesod chairman Sam Grundwerg.In the agreement reached last week between the liberal, center-left bloc and the right-wing, Orthodox bloc in the World Zionist Congress, Blue and White was supposed to have nominated a candidate to succeed Grundwerg, an appointee of Netanyahu, in early 2021.But in a letter to the Keren Hayesod Board of Trustees, its chairman, Steven Lowy, said the deal was “unacceptable” to the trustee leadership, “and we will not recognize or consent to it.”The board of trustees unanimously supported Grundwerg to continue in the role since “any change to the world chairman position in the midst of this [coronavirus pandemic] crisis would cause instability, would be potentially catastrophic to the organization and its leadership and that Sam is best suited to continue in his role,” he said.The agreement reached and approved by the WZC was “solely based on political considerations,” Lowy said, and it would use “any means at our disposal that we deem necessary and appropriate to protect the rights” of Keren Hayesod.It is unclear where this leaves the process of appointing a new Keren Hayesod chairman or chairwoman, although it could presage a new fight between Likud and Blue and White.
