Israel's likely new finance minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said on Thursday that economic growth and raising the number of ultra-Orthodox in the workforce would be his main goals.
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Lieberman's Yisrael Beytenu party and seven other parties reached a coalition agreement on Wednesday night that would unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if it is ratified by the Knesset next week.
"This coalition will focus mainly on economic issues," Lieberman, a former defense minister, told Israel's Channel 13.
He said one major challenge would be to bring Israel's "unreasonable" budget deficit under control.
Another was to bring Haredi men into the labor force – currently only around half of them work, the others are devoted full-time to religious studies and rely on government allowances and handouts from donors.
"We will do everything to provide them an education and enable them to learn a profession and stand on their own two feet, as opposed to charity and all the stipends," he said.
But the main goal was to heal the economy, he said.
"We are a country that hasn't had a budget for the past two years already," he said.
On the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic, Israel's economy contracted 2.6% in 2020 but could see growth of as much as 6% this year.
Similarly, the budget deficit jumped to 11.6% last year from 3.7% in 2019 due to large stimulus spending to help businesses and households cope with the crisis.
"It's terrible," Lieberman said of the higher deficit. "Generally the government's deficit target is 2.5% or 2.7%. When you jump from 2.5% to 11.6%, that's unreasonable."
Israel is using a pro-rated version of a base budget from 2019 that was approved in mid-2018.
Lieberman said he plans to implement a comprehensive economic stability program "to create growth because you have to increase the budget, not the budget deficit."
Once he takes office, he said, his first phone calls will be to the central bank governor and the heads of the Manufacturers' Association and Histadrut Labor Federation.
When asked whether he would raise taxes, Lieberman said, "That's not effective." But he did not rule out higher taxes as part of a broader plan.
On Tuesday, however, United Torah Judaism MK Israel Eichler told Israel Radio that Lieberman's would-be appointment as finance minister was "a declaration of war against a million Haredi citizens of Israel."
"If United Torah Judaism were to get the Treasury and the Knesset Finance Committee, the media would have talked about extortion," Eichler said.
Eichler made his comments after Israel Hayom reported that under the likely coalition agreement, Yisrael Beytenu would secure the Finance portfolio, the Negev and Galilee Development portfolio, and apparently another ministry. In addition, an MK from the party would be appointed head of the Knesset Finance Committee, a role UTJ chair Moshe Gafni currently holds.
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Shas MK Yinon Azoulay expressed similar sentiments in an interview to Army Radio.
"Everyone is in [the new government] – the national religious, the Left, and the Arab sector, but not the Haredim. They have a political right to form a government, but they don't have a right to take Haredi children and allow them to go hungry," Azoulay said.
Yehuda Shlezinger contributed to this report.
