Strange Political Bedfellows - The New York Times - 0 views
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It includes eight parties, drawn from the hard right, the left and the center — and one Arab party. A more intuitive governing coalition would have comprised only of parties on the right, which together hold a slim majority of Israel’s Parliament.
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Netanyahu — like Trump, his ally in global affairs — is the subject of serious allegations of abuse of government. Prosecutors indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges in 2019, and the trial has been delayed partly because of Covid-19 restrictions.
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His attempts to fend off the charges and remain in power have left many Israelis worried about a collapse in judicial independence and the rule of law, much as Democrats were anxious about Trump’s norm-breaking, as David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explained to me. But there is also a big difference: While Republicans have overwhelmingly stood by Trump, a meaningful number of Netanyahu’s ideological allies have chosen to break with him.
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Over the last few days, factions from the right, center and left decided that they wanted to be done with Netanyahu. They agreed to a power-sharing agreement in which Bennett and his nationalist Yamina party would hold the prime minister’s position for the first half of the four-year term, to be followed by Yair Lapid, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, who would hold it for the second half.
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o keep the coalition together, they have vowed to avoid new policies on Israeli-Palestinian issues at the beginning and to focus on areas where compromise seems more plausible, like education and infrastructure.