The Knesset voted early Friday morning to disband itself ahead of the October 27 election, heading to recess after the coalition’s last-ditch blitz succeeded in passing a spate of controversial legislation into law.

The motion to dissolve parliament, tacked onto a party financing bill, was approved 62-0 with the sole support of coalition lawmakers before dawn, sending the legislative body to recess until the next parliament is sworn in following the election.

During the recess, committees may hold meetings under special arrangements, and the government or 25 MKs may demand that the Knesset plenum be convened.

Shas chairman MK Aryeh Deri threatened not to back the legislation dispersing the Knesset, demanding that opposition parties also support the bill, which hikes public funding for political parties competing in the election. He eventually backed down from the threat.

If the bill were to have failed, it would have granted the Knesset another week to pass legislation, up until 90 days before the election date, according to Knesset Legal Adviser Sagit Afik, who recommended passing the bill in its entirety.

Yisrael Beytenu chair Avigdor Liberman, a member of the opposition, characterized the legislation as a bid to exploit taxpayer money before the legislative body dispersed and called it a “contemptible attempt to tie the end of the session to increasing party funding.”

The loggerheads were characteristic of the past week, tumultuous as the coalition fast-tracked several extremely divisive bills through its final readings and approved a spate of budgeting requests, some linked to funds earmarked in coalition agreements.

Speaking in the plenum, Knesset Speaker MK Amir Ohana, of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called the 25th Knesset the “most challenging” in Israeli history.

“It included protests of many kinds, accompanied the longest and most difficult war in the country’s........

© The Times of Israel