The speaker of the Knesset has called for the Israeli parliament to be dissolved and for fresh elections to be held, following government defeats, public radio reported yesterday.
Reuven Rivlin launched his appeal after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered another embarrassing defeat at the hands of parliament Tuesday when he was defeated in a special debate called by MPs over corruption.
Just hours after deputies had approved three censure motions, they then voted against the government at the end of the corruption debate despite an impassioned defense by the prime minister himself.
Cronyism
The corruption debate was called in the wake of a damning report last month by Israel's state comptroller who warned that a culture of cronyism and corruption at the heart of government was threatening the very fabric of the state.
But Sharon told MPs that a politically-motivated campaign was being waged in order to tarnish the image of his own Likud party.
"There is a campaign at the moment in the public arena which is being conducted under the slogan `the fight against corruption' but whose real goal is to blacken the name of Likud," said Sharon.
Sharon himself was at the center of two separate corruption scandals but no charges have ever been brought against him.
According to the radio report, Rivlin argued that "Mr Sharon has lost his electoral base and parliament should pronounce its self-dissolution and organize elections."
Rivlin is one of the ruling Likud party "Rebels" opposed to Sharon's plan to pull troops out of the Gaza Strip.
After months of political wrangling, Sharon managed to stitch together a broad-based coalition earlier this year in order to pass through his controversial Gaza Strip pullout plan.
Gaza pullout
But he remains vulnerable to ambushes by the opposition, especially as he has lost the support of some MPs from his right-wing party who are disgusted by the prospect of the Gaza settlers being uprooted from their homes this summer.
The pull-out plan calls for the evacuation of some 8,000 Israeli settlers from the 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four others in the West Bank.
The Knesset needs a majority vote to dissolve itself.
The legislature would normally finish its term at the end of next year.
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