Thread by @IsraelexLive

For the benefit of my foreign followers - particularly Americans who are unfamiliar with parliamentary democracy - I'm going to break down exactly where Israeli politics stand at the moment.

To become prime minister after an election, you need to form a coalition. This requires two steps:

1) You need the legal right (the "mandate") to present a coalition for approval.
2) The coalition must pass an up-or-down vote among the 120 members of the Knesset.

Currently the prime minister is the head of the right-wing Likud party, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But the mandate is held by the head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, Yair Lapid. Lapid has the mandate until end of day Tuesday, which gives him less than 2.5 days to form a coalition.

Yesh Atid has 17 seats. It has signed coalition agreements with center-left Labor (7 seats), far-left Meretz (6 seats), and secular-right Israel Beiteinu (7 seats), for a total of 37 seats.

Lapid hopes to get centrist Blue & White (8 seats), secular-right New Hope (6 seats), and quasireligious-right Yamina (7 seats) to sign on.

He has, as I said, through Tuesday to get them on board. This would give him 58 MKs supporting him as prime minister... sort of.

You see, getting Yamina to sign on was difficult - so difficult, in fact, that Lapid had to promise Yamina's leader Naftali Bennett not only that they would take turns being Prime Minister, but that Bennett would get his turn first.

So even though Lapid has the mandate and more than twice as many seats, it will be Bennett who actually replaces Netanyahu as prime minister (the first religious prime minister in the history of the state of Israel, despite the country's reputation as a religious state).

And not only that, but one of Yamina's MKs, Amichai Chikli, opposes the deal despite these concessions. So even if Lapid does manage to juggle the competing demands of all these right-wing and left-wing parties, he still only has the support of 57 of the Knesset's 120 members.

There are other problems. The first: it's not clear that Lapid can offer the prime ministry to someone who doesn't hold the mandate (see attached thread, though if you aren't familiar with Israeli politics I recommend finishing the current thread first).

https://twitter.com/IsraelexLive/status/1398922825583497216

The second is, of course, the opposition. There are 52 seats' worth of center-right, far-right, and religious-right parties that are certain to vote against this government. Add 1 for Amichai Chikli: 53 seats.

So far Lapid still leads, 57-53.

But there are 10 more seats in the Knesset, belonging to the two Arab parties: the Islamist party Ra'am (4) and the communist/Arab nationalist alliance The Joint List (6).

Arab parties have refused to join any coalition since 1977, and in that time have almost always voted against their formation. Many Jewish parties, too, refuse to work with them - a taboo that was broken by Netanyahu openly courting Ra'am when he held the mandate last month.

Lapid is therefore also in talks with Ra'am and the Joint List. If they abstain, Lapid wins the vote 57-53 and forms a coalition. But if TJL votes against, Lapid will need active support from Ra'am to win.

(It's also possible the Joint List MKs will not all vote the same way.)

Now, I said Lapid has the mandate through Tuesday - but this does NOT mean he has to win the vote by then. That deadline is for announcing he has a coalition ready to present to the Knesset for approval.

Announcing this, true or not, gives him 7 days to hold and win the vote.

If Lapid's efforts fail - either because the mandate expires on Tuesday night without such an announcement, or if he makes the announcement but loses the vote, or if he makes the announcement and doesn't hold the vote within 7 days - we go to what is called the signature phase.

During the signature phase, any MK from any party can get the mandate by collecting signatures from 60 other MKs. This is more difficult than the up-or-down coalition vote we've been discussing, because abstentions don't help; you need a majority of affirmative support.

The signature phase is 21 days long; if nobody succeeds in that time, Israel will have to hold yet another redo election in the fall (see thread for details).

https://twitter.com/IsraelexLive/status/1398232672829423627

And that's where we stand today: The prime minister held by one man, the mandate to become prime minister held by another, and the actual office to be occupied by a third... maybe.

Either that or we can look forward to Israel's fifth election in 2.5 years.

In the above thread, I repeatedly said that Lapid's prime ministerial mandate expires end of day Tuesday.

This is of course completely incorrect. It expires end of day Wednesday. I apologize for the error.