“Barring any external factors, this government could last two or three years,” Tourism Minister Yariv Levin assessed in an interview with Al-Monitor. Levin, now the Likud minister closest to the prime minister, was Benjamin Netanyahu’s point person in the coalition negotiations to expand the government that ended with the surprising entry of Avigdor Liberman as defense minister. “We realized that with a 61-seat coalition, we’d be approaching elections very quickly,” said Levin, explaining the political maneuvering to stabilize the government. He made it clear that as far as Netanyahu is concerned, there would be further attempts to bring all or part of the Zionist Camp into the government too.

The rest of the interview follows:

Al-Monitor:  The 61-member coalition seemed stable; the fact that any single member of it could have brought it down actually made them more responsible. Was that really the case?

Levin:  That’s a mistake. If we had kept it at 61 seats, the government would have collapsed because of internal problems within the Likud. I don’t know what we would have done with the budget, and I have no idea if we would even have been able to get Tzachi Hanegbi’s appointment through [as a minister without portfolio]. Expanding the government reduced all the pressure on us. It made it much harder for individual Knesset members to come up to us with all sorts of demands and threats.