When Avigdor Liberman was foreign minister and defense minister, then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was clearly still in charge of making the big decisions.
Now that he is finance minister, Liberman’s power is unquestionable. Arguably Israel’s strongest finance minister since Netanyahu left the post 16 years ago, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has given him the right to handle Israel’s finances by himself.
Other finance ministers were limited by the oversight of an independent chairman of the Knesset Finance Committee and meddling deputy ministers. Liberman has his underlings in Yisrael Beytenu, MK Alex Kushnir and Hamed Amer, as the committee chairman and a minister inside the Finance Ministry.
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Liberman earned that power by taking the first steps to bring Netanyahu down. His refusal to join a Netanyahu-led coalition after the April 2019 election led to the three elections that followed, and his agreement to enter a coalition with Ra’am (United Arab List) head Mansour Abbas ended the political crisis.
The Jerusalem Post once asked Liberman whom he hated more: Arabs, haredim (ultra-Orthodox) or Netanyahu. He gave an ambiguous response at the time, but since then, the answer has become clear.
He deposed Netanyahu and blocked Shas and United Torah Judaism from joining the current government. But in a recent interview with Maariv journalist Ben Caspit, Liberman, who built a career out of fighting Arab politicians, praised Abbas and justified investing an unprecedented amount in the Arab sector in the 2021-2022 state budget.
Liberman has said that his job as finance minister is to do what is best for the economy, not to make friends. And he is taking that commitment seriously.
The budget he has put forth is one of the most ambitious Israel has seen, with reforms touching on most aspects of life. Most of the reforms he is looking to push through are in the fields of agriculture, regulation and bureaucracy, housing, employment, transportation and other matters, which are fixes that the OECD and local economists have been recommending for years or even decades.
But he will have to do battle with many interest groups to push them through by the November 4 deadline when elections would be automatically initiated if the budget is not yet passed into law. Lobbies of farmers, IDF soldiers and the handicapped have already started protesting. The haredim will fight reforms about kosher supervision that are in Liberman’s Economic Arrangements bill, the omnibus legislation that accompanies the budget.
Meanwhile, Liberman has tried to stay above the fray on other issues. He attempted to stay away from everything related to COVID-19, like the plague that it is. He was criticized for sending Amer to the Ministerial Committee on the Coronavirus, but he continued keeping his distance.
Liberman will make every effort to keep the government going for its entire term that ends in November 2025, which would require passing another budget in two years.
Whenever the next election happens, if Netanyahu is not there, Liberman will be able to say that he is the only candidate who has held the defense, foreign affairs and finance portfolios and stake a claim for the premiership.
Or Liberman, who is 63, could retire from politics and earn a windfall in the private sector, taking advantage of the connections and experience he earned in his successful career in politics.