President Reuven Rivlin will give Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid the mandate to form a government the day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mandate ends on May 4, sources close to Rivlin said on Thursday.
Netanyahu’s associates have admitted that he has given up on forming a government but said he does not intend to return the mandate early and take the advice of advisers who told him it would catch Lapid and Yamina leader Naftali Bennett unprepared.
“Whoever receives the most recommendations from the factions will receive the mandate,” said a source close to the president.
Rivlin will not invite every faction to the President’s Residence for consultations, but he will invite whichever factions have changed their recommendation since the first round to either visit him or call.
In the first round, Lapid received 45 recommendations and Netanyahu 52, so Rivlin gave Netanyahu the mandate. While it is possible that parties who supported Netanyahu last time will recommend Bennett, even those closest to Bennett said he does not believe he will receive more recommendations than Lapid.
Technically, Rivlin has the right to extend Netanyahu’s mandate by two weeks, but Rivlin’s associates said that would not happen, because the extension is only intended to give time for coalition negotiations, and there are no such talks taking place.
During the consultations, Rivlin noted that he did not have to give a second mandate. But his associates said he has since made up his mind that he would.
They noted that the reason he gave the mandate back to the Knesset after the last election was to bring Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz together, but they said there is no similar situation now.
Moreover, if the mandate is given to the Knesset, the support of 61 MKs would be needed to form a government, while a minority coalition backed from the outside by Ra’am (Joint Arab List) could be formed with Rivlin’s mandate.
In an effort to build a coalition as soon as possible, Lapid has been meeting with the heads of the parties that would join. On Thursday night, he met with Gantz.
Lapid has said he would enable Bennett to go first in a rotation in the Prime Minister’s Office. There have been disagreements between them over Bennett’s demand that the Right receive a disproportionate amount of portfolios to make up for the Center-Left’s numerical advantage in the coalition.
The coalition formed by Bennett and Lapid will include 58 MKs from their parties, Blue and White, Yisrael Beytenu, Labor, Meretz and New Hope. Lapid was set to meet United Torah Judaism leader Moshe Gafni on Monday in an effort to seek his support from outside the coalition, but the meeting was postponed for what they called technical reasons.
In a last-ditch effort to prevent the formation of such a government, pundits close to Netanyahu wrote Yamina MK Ayelet Shaked on social media on Thursday, urging her to defect to Netanyahu’s side. She rejected the overtures and reiterated that she was fully coordinated with Bennett.