BICOM

Israel’s President Shimon Peres will today begin asking party leaders to recommend who should form a new government and is expected by Friday to invite current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to construct a coalition.

At 5.30pm, Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Elyakim Rubinstein will present Peres with the official results of last week’s election. Peres will then immediately begin to meet individually with representatives of each of the twelve elected parties, in order of their parliamentary size. As such, he will meet first with representatives of the joint Likud-Beitenu list, which won 31 seats, followed by Yair Lapid and two other incoming MKs representing the second largest party Yesh Atid. Peres will meet representatives of the remaining ten parties tomorrow.

It is expected that Netanyahu will be endorsed to form the next government by his Likud-Beitenu faction, Yesh Atid, Jewish Home, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Kadima. In total these parties command the support of 81 of the incoming Knesset’s 120 members. The representatives of the Labour Party, Meretz, Hatnuah, Hadash, Ta’al and Balad are expected not to recommend anybody.

If the recommendation process develops as expected, Peres is reportedly set to grant Netanyahu the right to form the next government on Friday. This will signal the beginning of formal coalition negotiations that are expected to take several weeks. However, preliminary informal talks have been taking place since last week’s election. Netanyahu and Lapid met last week and it is thought that Lapid and Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett met on Tuesday. Although Netanyahu has stated his intention to form a broad government, he faces the challenge of bringing together disparate factions, notably Yesh Atid and ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, who disagree sharply on the issue of a universal military draft.