Knesset okays expanded cabinet, handing PM first victory

The Knesset on Wednesday voted 61-59 to remove the limit on the number of ministers in the cabinet, paving the way for the swearing-in of the fourth Netanyahu government, possibly as early as Thursday.

The narrow win for the bill was the coalition’s first significant victory in parliament, highlighting the dangers for a coalition of 61 out of a total of 120 Knesset members.

The bill, which passed its third and final reading Wednesday afternoon, freezes an amendment to the Basic Law: The Government that limits the number of ministers to 18, which passed during the last Knesset.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants to form a cabinet with 20 ministers to allow representation for all five parties in his coalition.

But with the 18-minister limit now suspended for the duration of the current Knesset, Netanyahu is free to expand the cabinet even further – for example, if his efforts to bring the center-left Zionist Union into a broad unity coalition bear fruit.

The expansion of the cabinet – an expansion only on paper, as the new government will actually be smaller than the last one, which had 22 ministers – drew harsh criticism from the opposition during Wednesday’s Knesset debate.

Zionist Union chairman MK Isaac Herzog led the pack of opposition MKs heaping ridicule on the coalition.

“Good morning, Benjamin Netanyahu, a prime minister who instead of solving problems in the country sells the state and intends to waste half a billion shekels to appease his MKs,” Herzog declared in the plenum. “The prime minister is selling the country and we are paying for it.”

In the preface to the bill, the coalition itself seemed to acknowledge that the expansion of the cabinet was due to political exigency rather than the demands of governance, noting that it was necessitated by the demands of coalition agreements signed between Likud and its coalition partners and by “the need for a stable coalition.”

Yisrael Beytenu party head Avigdor Liberman, who unexpectedly stepped down as foreign minister last week and refused to join the new coalition, spoke of his delight in finally being free of the restrictions of a minister.

“I am almost excited that, finally, I can go up to the Knesset podium and speak without coalition discipline, and without the limitations of office – it is really paradise,” he said. “The problem with this government is it is a government with no taste or smell, with no future, no hope, without a dream. We will need to live with that, and I hope that we will live with it for a short time.”

Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid, however, was of the opinion that the new government — which put Likud together with centrist Kulanu, the right-wing Jewish Home and two ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism — did give off a scent.

“This building has a sense of smell, and it is sniffing the air and saying that the government has not even been set up and there is no smell of celebration in the air, only the smell of mold,” Lapid said. “We already know that this government is a group of people who don’t like each other, who don’t want each other to succeed, who look at each other with suspicion.”

The amendment to the Basic Law: The Government was approved in the last government — effectively limiting the cabinet to 19 members including the prime minister, plus four deputy ministers, and outlawing the institution of ministers without portfolio — and was touted at the time as a major reform.