“Neither Netanyahu nor Gantz Will Budge For the Next Month”

I 

t’s over six weeks since Israel’s second elections, and there’s still no government. The line of bureaucrats on Tuesday outside the Knesset Finance Committee headed by Moshe Gafni was a sign of a paralyzed country. They were there to plead for stopgap funding to keep the lights on in their respective ministries – forget any long-term thinking.

While Gafni approved funding requests of nearly five billion shekels, I asked Degel Hatorah politician Yitzchak Pindrus the million-dollar question:

Will there be a coalition, or are we heading for the country’s third elections?

Nothing will change for another month at least, and that was clear from the day after the elections. Gantz has about two and a half weeks left of his twenty-eight days to form a government, and then there’s another twenty-one days after that during which any MK can form a government. Only in the last ten to fifteen days of that period will anything change. To be clear, neither side wants elections, but under pressure, things could change. Until then, both sides think that the other will give way.

How will rolling the dice in another election help – the right wing-religious bloc doesn’t have 61 seats without Lieberman?

Short of Gantz or Lieberman bowing to the pressure, nothing will change in the math, and we could go for a third or fourth elections.