MK Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Arab faction Ra'am, hinted on Thursday the coalition may have reached the end of the road just over a year after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett assembled the unlikely patchwork of Right-Left parties and swore in a government.
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Abbas said that the recent infighting among coalition MKs over various policy issues, which led to some members siding with the opposition on certain matters or abstaining at key votes, "could mean that it is time for the coalition to call an early election that will bring us back to the same place."
Abbas said that the partnership between his Arab party and the Jewish parties "is a long process and if we succeed, we could come back from an election just as strong," but conceded that the internal squabbling could result in the government collapsing and ultimately be regarded as a failed experiment in Arab-Jewish political cooperation.
He said that his party has been willing to compromise its ideological stance in order to keep the coalition intact and that "from the get-go, I never tried to tackle all that needs to be tackled," essentially reiterating Bennett's stance that the wide ideological spectrum of parties was not going to effect major changes on hot-button issues.
Abbas said that he was focused on things that could be considered "life and death," such as the rising crime in Arab communities.
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