Likud still hopes to reach deal with Blue and White to avoid election

Sources close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed hope on Wednesday night that in the next week, a deal to avoid elections will be reached with Blue and White.Netanyahu said at a news conference that if Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz wishes, the unity government can be maintained.  Coalition chairman Miki Zohar and sources in Blue and White said there were no talks as yet between the parties. But there is still a week until Blue and White intends to pass the Knesset dispersal bill into law.“If Blue and White wants to commit suicide they can, but I very much hope they change their minds,” Zohar said.One possibility is to postpone, rather than cancel, the agreement on a rotation in the Prime Minister’s Office which would enable passing the next two state budgets. At his press conference, Netanyahu avoided questions about the rotation.Netanyahu’s associates said the new party of Gideon Sa’ar was not the reason the party wanted to avoid elections, which the Knesset House Committee set for March 16 on Wednesday, when it advanced the Knesset dispersal bill in 10-7 vote. Blue and White and opposition MKs supported the bill; Likud, Shas and United Torah Judaism MKs voted against it.

 But Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin (Likud) said he would insist that the election date be set by consensus of all factions, as has traditionally been done in the past, and not imposed unprecedentedly by one side. “This vote is a vote against the state,” Likud MK Shlomo Karhi told the committee. The bill will be put to a vote at its first reading in the Knesset plenum on Monday. Blue and White faction chairman Eitan Ginzburg, who chairs the House Committee, said he hopes to pass the bill into law by the end of next week, which would give the Central Elections Committee the 90 days requested by its head, Orly Ades, to prepare for the election.Joint List MK Ahmad Tibi asked Ginzburg whether the bill was still relevant after Sa’ar’s decision to form a new party that in polls took seats away from Blue and White and Likud. Ginzburg responded that as a Knesset veteran, Tibi could figure that out for himself.
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