Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will weigh a motion to cancel national elections in September, a gambit that would give him time to focus on his legal defence in several looming corruption cases.
“The speaker of the Knesset asked that we meet in coming days, and I’ll do that,” Netanyahu said in a statement Wednesday. Netanyahu’s failure to form a government came after he pushed potential coalition partners to support measures granting parliamentarians legal immunity. Israel’s attorney general plans to indict Netanyahu in three separate corruption cases, pending a hearing set for October. Even if Netanyahu won the September election he’d be hard-pressed to establish a government before his hearing, leaving him vulnerable.
With Netanyahu, “anything is possible. The man has no shame when it comes to doing things for his own personal benefit and survival,” said Mitchell Barak, head of Keevoon Research, Strategy & Communications in Jerusalem. “It’s not in his best interest to go to elections because he might lose.”