Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, voted on Wednesday to approve the state budgets for 2023 and 2024. While some are celebrating the sustainability of the promise of such a move, others are criticizing the decision to pass the two-year budget as undemocratic.
passage of budget seen as a victory of Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuWho managed to overcome the budgetary demands and ultimatums of various coalition members.
The Knesset had until May 29 to pass the state budget for 2023. If the Knesset failed to pass the budget by that date, the government would be dissolved and new elections will be called, Although the requirement was to pass a budget only for the remainder of 2023, the Knesset passed a budget for 2024 as well.
Passing a budget is one of the biggest hurdles facing Israeli coalitions
Passing the state budget is one of the biggest hurdles facing any Israeli coalition. As recently as 2020, the government fell due to its inability to pass a budget. Passing the budget for 2024 as well as 2023Therefore, it provides long-term stability for the coalition, but has also been criticized by some as illegitimate and undemocratic.
The Movement for Quality Government (MQG), an Israeli non-profit organization dedicated to promoting democracy and good governance, submitted a petition to the Supreme Court on Wednesday alleging that the biennial budget was illegal.
The petition is based on the precedent of a 2017 Supreme Court judgement, which mandated a one-year budget because of problems with budgeting for more than one year. Israel first passed a biennial budget in 2009. In November 2021, the government passed the budget for December 2021 as well as 2022.
Ariel Barzile, a lawyer and head of the MQG’s economic wing, told The Media Line that the biennial budget is problematic for two reasons. First, long-term budgets reduce the Knesset’s ability to oversee government decisions. Barziley said that if the proposed judicial reforms are passed, and are not taken into account in the budget, Israel could also be in a very different economic situation in 2024.
On the other hand, Yechil Leiter, a public policy analyst, director general of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Netanyahu’s former chief of staff at the Ministry of Finance, told Media Line that two years of budget approval is a sign of government stability, which has a positive impact on Israel. Will have an effect.
Alex Koman, Israel’s senior economic adviser, said the roughly 998-billion-shekel ($269 billion) budget would not actually be implemented according to the bill passed. “We must understand that this budget is far from what it is actually going to be,” he told Media Line. He said that Netanyahu made many promises to please his coalition partners, many of which he would not be able to fulfill.
“The revenue that the government is going to get is much less than what they calculated,” he said. He explained that the budget is based on the assumption that the government will be able to bring in a significant amount of revenue from taxes on high-tech companies. But the high-tech sector is “wounded and bleeding,” Common said, and the government will receive significantly less tax revenue from the sector than expected.
He said the real estate sector is also struggling, and inflation is high, which will also affect the government’s ability to generate revenue.
Leiter disputes that characterization, saying that the government should be able to bring in the expected revenue. Except in an unexpected national emergency, “budgets are generally implemented as they are passed.” He said the high-tech sector is “doing quite well.”
Leiter also said that Netanyahu’s promise of money from specific parties in order to pass the budget was not a new thing. In 1993, the government promised a large sum of money to the ultra-conservative Shas party in exchange for its support of the Oslo Accords, he said.
However, Barzilay insisted that the budget’s earmarked funds were out of the ordinary.
“The previous budget was about 1.5 billion shekels [$403 million] which was given to specific parties, and now it is 14 billion shekels [$3.8 billion], It’s a huge difference,” he said.