Israel’s government collapses, prompting the fifth election in four years

A their first anniversary in office, the two leaders of Israel’s unwieldy government announced jointly on June 20th that they had “exhausted all efforts to stabilise the coalition” and would be dissolving Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Israel is heading for its fifth general election in less than four years.A series of inconclusive elections and a long period of political paralysis were supposed to have come to an end last June, when , an arch-nationalist, and Yair Lapid, leader of Israel’s largest centrist party, managed to yoke together eight disparate parties, including an independent Arab party—the first ever to participate in an Israeli government. This clunky coalition was able to hold a wafer-thin majority in the Knesset, so ending Binyamin Netanyahu’s .