The Knesset plenum will begin final debates and voting on the 2025 state budget at approximately 8:00 p.m. on Monday evening.
The debates are expected to continue overnight. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, Opposition Leader MK Yair Lapid, and Knesset Finance Committee chairman MK Moshe Gafni will give closing statements beginning at 11:30 on Tuesday morning, after which voting will commence. The budget is expected to pass into law on Tuesday afternoon.
The debates and voting will end months of parliamentary and political drama that began with the budget’s approval in the government in late October 2024.
With its passage, the government will clear a major political hurdle, as failure to pass the state budget by March 31 would have toppled the government.
The government’s majority was not guaranteed until MK Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party returned to the government last week, since members of the Hassidic Agudat Yisrael party threatened to oppose the budget over the government’s failure to deliver on a campaign promise to exempt a large number of haredi yeshiva students from IDF service.
Netanyahu's meetings with haredi leaders
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to at least three haredi spiritual leaders on Sunday in order to shore up support for the budget of their representatives in the Knesset – Lithuanian haredi leader Rabbi Moshe Hillel Hirsch, the Hassidic Belzer Rebbe Yissachar Dov Rokeach, and the Hassidic Ger Rebbe Yaakov Aryeh Alter.
Hirsch, Alter, and Lithuanian leader Rabbi Dov Lando met later on Sunday.
In a statement following the meeting, the three rabbis said that they would quit the coalition if progress had not been made on the haredi draft bill by Shavuot. The statement essentially postponed Alter's prior ultimatum that the bill must pass prior to the budget.
