Yisrael Beytenu will promote a law that will require the approval of 90 Knesset members to disperse the Knesset during its first two years, party leader Avigdor Liberman said at the party’s official campaign launch in Neve Ilan’s C Hotel on Sunday.
“We as politicians failed,”? Liberman said. “We are dragging the nation of Israel to a fifth election, and therefore it is important to ensure governmental stability in a simple, not complicated way.”
"We as politicians failed, we are dragging the nation of Israel to a fifth election and therefore it is important to ensure governmental stability in a simple, not complicated way"
Avigdor Liberman, Finance Minister
Like many other parties, governmental stability was the first and most important issue on the campaign’s agenda. Besides changing the Knesset dispersal rules, the party will also promote requiring a two-year budget be passed instead of a one-year budget, and also limit a prime minister to two succeeding terms and prevent someone who has been indicted from running for either prime minister or president.
“In the last government, we managed to pass a two-year budget with a clear order of priorities,” Liberman said. “There has never been a government that managed to do as much in one year as this government, but at the same time, there are quite a few acute issues that we did not have time to realize. With all due respect to the names in the lists, what is really important is the values that we promote.”
Along with stable governance, the party’s agenda included three other points: improving public security, economic growth, and reducing inequality while strengthening Israel’s civil robustness.
On public security, the party is pushing to add 3,000 police officers to the Israel Police: 1,000 for the North, 1,000 for the South, and the last 1,000 spread out in municipal police stations, especially in mixed Arab-Jewish cities.
On the economy, the party’s agenda aims to broaden criteria to receive government income support, so that single people over age 26 and those who make less than NIS 8,000 will be eligible.
Asked about the Likud’s economic platform, which Likud and opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu announced earlier this month, Liberman said that it was “taken directly from Karl Marx,” since it stipulated that “people receive things for free.”
On the other hand, Liberman likened the Labor’s economic agenda as being similar to North Korea.
Other noticeable items on the party’s agenda included government subsidization of 50% of the cost of an academic degree for all IDF soldiers, and not just the current 75% subsidy for combat soldiers; conditioning support for haredi schools on their willingness to teach core curriculums including English and mathematics; amending the Nation-State Law so that it reflects Israel’s Declaration of Independence; and enacting legislation to require that new immigrants be represented in the public sector.
"At the end of the day I estimate that the Change Bloc will form the next coalition"
Avigdor Liberman, Finance Minister
“At the end of the day I estimate that the Change Bloc will form the next coalition,” and Yisrael Beytenu will attempt to make these issues part of its guidelines, Finance Minister Liberman said.