Parties focus on key causes, not just posts, as talks kick off

BY HAVIV RETTIG GUR, TOI

Coalition talks got underway Thursday in the Knesset as the Likud party made its first official bid to cobble together a coalition amid competing interests between various potential partners.

Party officials are meeting with each potential coalition partner’s negotiating team to hear their expectations and hopes for the next government.

Each party has two hours to make its initial case. Likud’s four-member team is spending as much as 11 hours Thursday hearing and challenging the other parties’ demands.

It’s the start of a grueling process for all concerned — and a critically important one. While Israel’s politicians are understandably focused on the jobs up for grabs, the coalition talks are about much more than seats.

They’re also about legislation. Each potential coalition partner is seeking to secure from Likud a written promise in their bilateral coalition agreements to advance their favored legislation.

For some lawmakers on the right, that means pushing forward the so-called “nation-state bill” that stalled when the previous government fell last December. It also means advancing proposals for changing the relationship between the Knesset and the High Court of Justice, giving the political system more power in judicial appointments (an area where the High Court itself and the Israel Bar Association currently have a majority), and empowering the Knesset to override constitutional rulings if it can muster sufficiently large majorities.

For Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett, that means obtaining guarantees that the coalition will support some sort of resolution to land ownership claims related to some West Bank settlements built on land of questionable provenance.

It also means advancing bills that will dramatically raise taxes on foreign governmental donations to Israeli political organizations – a deeply controversial measure favored by the right.

For Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu party, it means ensuring its proposed reforms for lowering housing prices and the cost of living will be part of the coalition’s fundamental written policy guidelines.

For the ultra-Orthodox parties, it means ensuring that the universal draft bill passed in the last Knesset is weakened or overturned.

And for Yisrael Beytenu, it means putting into law Avigdor Liberman’s election mantra of “a death penalty for terrorists.” This particular campaign promise, as Liberman well knew, has almost no chance of ever being realized, but the party may make a show of demanding it nonetheless.

In straightforward political terms, all these issues and more may well be decided before the government is formed and before the 20th Knesset holds a single vote.

And the coalition talks are a fight, as well, for vast amounts of public funds. The ultra-Orthodox want to restore past levels of funding that once flowed from state coffers to their educational institutions. Jewish Home wants to ensure new funds for settlement building and West Bank infrastructure through institutions such as the Settlement Division. And on and on.

In the end, the coalition agreement will consist of five bilateral agreements between the ruling Likud and each of its five likely coalition partners — Yisrael Beytenu, Jewish Home, UTJ, Shas and Kulanu — and a sixth document laying out the coalition’s “guidelines” and values.

Crucially, these agreements have the force of a legal contract, a status that has already withstood judicial review, which is a major reason the talks are so fierce. Whatever one obtains in a coalition agreement one might reasonably expect to see implemented by the new government.

Seats
Of course, the parceling out of ministries and committees is nothing to sneeze at either. Ministers have a profound influence on policy and can move vast budgets around to reflect their priorities, while Knesset committee chairs often have the power to expedite or bury legislation at will.

Even at this early stage, with only informal talks and a handful of leaks to go on, it is possible to discern some of the characteristics and political fault lines of the nascent government from the emerging fights over seats.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s obsession with stability and continuity is already on full display. In each government he has led, he has always preferred to let ministers remain in their jobs if it was at all possible to do so.

Thus on Wednesday, Netanyahu suggested – but didn’t promise, Likud insists – that United Torah Judaism’s MK Yaakov Litzman return to the Health Ministry and the party’s MK Moshe Gafni chair the Finance Committee, positions both held in the recent past.

Moshe Kahlon poses with volunteers of his Kulanu party in South Tel Aviv on Mar. 17, 2015. (photo credit: Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)
Moshe Kahlon poses with volunteers of his Kulanu party in South Tel Aviv on Mar. 17, 2015. (photo credit: Judah Ari Gross/Times of Israel)

This non-promise met with bitter rebuke from Kulanu’s Moshe Kahlon, and thus revealed another key feature of the new government: unlike Yair Lapid during his first term in power, Moshe Kahlon is no neophyte. Where Lapid almost entirely ignored the chairmanship of Knesset committees in his coalition demands — apparently not understanding how key they were — and so could only have his way in the Knesset by turning every legislative initiative into a coalition crisis, Kahlon, a veteran of three Knessets and once a successful cabinet minister, is keen on securing the entire pipeline of government finances in order to control all the levers he will need to push through his reforms smoothly and efficiently.

He has already secured Netanyahu’s promise that he will hold the Finance Ministry. Now he aims to gain control of the Knesset Finance Committee. A finance minister from a minority party (Kulanu has just 10 seats in a 120-seat Knesset, a scale that will be reflected in its representation on the Finance Committee) who does not also control the chairmanship of the Finance Committee could find his initiatives defunded and stymied at every turn.

In an important sense, the 2015 election has not yet ended

And so Kulanu announced on Thursday morning it would not attend the opening round of coalition talks with Likud in protest at the “handing out” of such a critical Knesset post to MK Gafni before the coalition talks even began.

It’s a crisis the sides are sure to weather. And Kulanu may well emerge the winner, as Netanyahu needs Kulanu to give his otherwise stable right-wing coalition a secure Knesset majority.

Some other emerging lessons are also the most obvious ones. For instance, the settlers are seeking control of the government’s settlement construction organs. A shrunken Jewish Home may lose control of the Housing Ministry in the next government, Jewish Home officials acknowledge, but the party hopes to lasso the Settlement Division, the body that actually builds settlements and is currently under the authority of the Prime Minister’s Office, into whatever coalition package it ends up with.

In an important sense, the 2015 election has not yet ended. The new parliament was elected on March 17; the new prime minister-designate was formally appointed on Wednesday. But Israel’s cabinet ministers, its parliamentary agenda for the coming years and the values and assumptions that will guide the new government will only be determined in the coming weeks.

Read more: Parties focus on key causes, not just posts, as talks kick off | The Times of Israel http://www.timesofisrael.com/parties-focus-on-pet-causes-not-just-posts-as-talks-kick-off/#ixzz3VUqyHcAm
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