A minister describes the president as a “leftist” and questions his mediation over judicial reform in Israel

June 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –

Israel’s Finance Minister, the far-right Bezalel Smotrich, described the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, as a “leftist” on Tuesday and has maintained that he cannot act as a mediator in talks with the opposition regarding the controversial reform judicial.

“I remember that the president published his position (on the reform) unilaterally. He is one hundred percent aligned with the left,” he said in statements given to the ultra-Orthodox Israeli station Kol BaRama. “The president is a leftist and, unfortunately, he is failing to be a fair broker,” he stressed.

Thus, he has indicated that the fact of addressing the talks in the president’s residence “is not correct from the democratic point of view” and has argued that “there is a Parliament.” “The mere fact that they took the discussion out of Parliament is an undemocratic decision,” she stressed.

“We went with an open mind, but we realized that there is no partner (in the talks),” Smotrich has settled on the process, which began after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suspended legislative proceedings in the Knesset to move forward with the reform in the face of complaints from the opposition and unprecedented mobilizations in the country.

In response to the minister’s words, the prominent opposition figure Benjamin Gantz, leader of the National Unity Party, has argued that Herzog “works day and night to prevent the destruction of democracy”, as reported by the Israeli newspaper ‘The Timnes of Israel’.

“Government ministers would do well to stop the serious damage that they are causing to citizens because of the regime’s coup, instead of accusing those who are doing everything possible to prevent it,” he said, a day after the government coalition will say it will unilaterally advance the legislation during a session in July.

This legislation seeks to cut the capacity for judicial review of government decisions, a central element of the reform, which has led Herzog to recall that “it has not sent any draft” to any of the parties nor is there “a total agreement” about “none of the points”. Therefore, he asked the parties to return to negotiations and added that “dialogue is the best solution for the State of Israel.”

Israel has lived through months of continuous protests against the judicial reform promoted by Netanyahu, whose objective is to give control of the Judicial Appointments Committee to the government party or coalition, which could also order the dismissal of judges in all courts, since the aforementioned body it has the authority to do so, without the need for a consensus with the representatives of the judicial apparatus.

Critics of the judicial reform argue that it is an attack on Israel’s balance of powers, fundamentally on the foundations on which democracy is based, since it gives Parliament unusual influence to overturn judicial decisions.