On Friday, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is scheduled to assume the position of interim prime minister under the terms of a coalition agreement reached between outgoing Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Lapid last year.
The vote, by 92 lawmakers and no dissenting vote, ends Bennett’s tenure as prime minister – one of the shortest periods in Israel’s history – and gives former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a path back to power.
Recent opinion polls show that Netanyahu’s Likud party is on course to win the most seats, but opinion polls do not show that his right-wing bloc will necessarily win enough seats for a parliamentary majority and be able to form a government alone.
Bennett had announced, on Wednesday, that he would not run for re-election, saying that “it is time to step back a little” and “look at things from the outside.”
The coalition government has been swaying for weeks, but Bennett and Lapid’s announcement last week that they want to dissolve their government came as a surprise.
“In the past few weeks, we’ve done everything we can to save this government,” Bennett said earlier in June, standing next to Lapid. “In our view, its continued existence was in the national interest.”
“Believe me,” Bennett added, “we tried in every way. We didn’t do it for ourselves, but for the sake of our beautiful country, for the sake of you citizens of Israel.”
The Bennett-Lapid government was sworn in in June last year, ending Netanyahu’s 12-year premiership.
