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It's a coalition of bitter enemies united behind a single goal: to oust Israel's longest serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

In an unlikely alliance, Yair Lapid, a centrist and former finance minister, will share power with nationalist hardliner and tech millionaire Naftali Bennett. An Arab faction — the conservative Islamist Ra'am party led by Mansour Abbas — will be part of an Israeli government for the first time in history.

Israel has had four inconclusive elections since April 2019. In the last vote in March, Bennett's Yamina party — a religious faction that opposes Palestinian statehood and wants to annex large sections of the occupied West Bank — won only seven seats in the 120-member parliament. But it was enough to make the former Netanyahu protégé a kingmaker.

He'll serve as prime minister for the first two years, then Lapid, who heads the largest party in the coalition with 17 seats, will take over as leader in 2023 under the power-sharing deal. If it holds together. As Yaacov Benmeleh writes, it's just one crisis away from falling apart.

Still, this is not a done deal. Parliament has to ratify the new coalition, and there's concern that Netanyahu's camp will try to defer that vote while trying to peel off defectors. Coalition members already hold irreconcilable views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All the while, Netanyahu, a polarizing figure who's dragged Israel to the right during his years in power, is doing whatever it takes to hang on as he fights multiple charges of corruption and influence peddling.

The 71-year-old has been dethroned before and come back even stronger. We may not have seen the last of him yet. Ruth Pollard 

A pedestrian passes an election campaign billboard for Netanyahu on March 15.

Photographer: Kobi Wolf/Bloomberg

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Global Headlines

China blacklist | President Joe Biden plans to amend a U.S. ban on investments in companies linked to China's defense and surveillance technology sectors, Jenny LeonardJennifer Jacobs and Saleha Mohsin report. The planned action comes after the Trump-era policy was challenged in court and left investors confused about the extent of its reach to subsidiary firms.

  • Biden's revival of the theory that the Covid-19 virus leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan risks damaging already strained U.S.-China ties.

Pause to reflect | World powers adjourned talks in Vienna with plans to return next week, as differences between Iran and the U.S. over how to revive the 2015 nuclear deal continue to delay the Islamic Republic's return to oil markets. Both the U.S. and Iran face "hard decisions," Enrique Mora, the European Union's deputy foreign policy chief, told reporters.

Not safe | As Covid-19 cases in the U.S. and Europe drop and vaccines there become plentiful, the Covax program to boost inoculations in poorer countries is still scrounging for doses. Stephanie Baker, James Paton and Ekow Dontoh explain that unless the shots become more widely available, the world won't return to normal any time soon.

Polar opposites | Jailed three times since 2018 and campaigning while out on bail, Keiko Fujimori is a controversial candidate for Peru's presidency. Her father Alberto, a former president, is still in prison. Yet, as Maria Cervantes and Matthew Bristow report, Keiko is investors' favorite for Sunday's neck-and-neck runoff because they fear her leftist opponent Pedro Castillo, while a jungle massacre casts a terrorist shadow over the election that plays to her law-and-order message.

A Fujimori campaign rally on May 10 in Lima.

Photographer: Angela Ponce/Bloomberg

Carbon cost | The EU is planning to make importers of steel, cement and aluminum pay for the greenhouse-gas emissions embedded in those goods, a source says. The goal, Ewa Krukowska and Alberto Nardelli report, is to ensure EU firms are on a level playing field with competitors in more lax regimes as the bloc tries to become the world's first climate-neutral continent by mid-century.

What to Watch

  • The Nigerian government condemned Twitter for deleting a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari threatening a crackdown on separatists in the southeast.
  • The EU is set to roll out a first round of sanctions on Belarus this week over the forced landing of a Ryanair flight and the arrest of a journalist, sources say.
  • A Swedish parliamentary committee is set today to deliver its verdict on the government's handling of the pandemic.

And finally ... Boxer-turned-politician Manny Pacquiao is emerging as an obstacle to Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's succession plans when his term ends next year. Pacquiao, an ally to Duterte, has rankled the strongman's loyalists since becoming acting head of the president's party and faces stiff competition for Duterte's endorsement ahead of the May 2022 vote.

Pacquiao.

Photographer: Christian Petersen/Getty Images North America

 

 

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