Tel Aviv, Sep 3 (IANS) Israel’s parliament approved the state budget in a preliminary vote years after two years of political stalemate.
Lawmakers on Thursday voted 59-54 in favor of the proposed budget, a spokesperson for Parliament, or Knesset, said in a statement.
The vote means the budget still has to pass two more rounds of votes before it gets final approval, reports the Xinhua News Agency.
According to a statement released earlier by the Ministry of Finance, the state budget for 2021 will be around 432.5 billion shekels ($ 135 billion) and around 452.5 billion shekels for 2022 (141 billions of dollars).
The approval is widely seen as a milestone for the all-party coalition government led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who took over from the country’s longest-serving leader Benjamin Netanyahu in June.
The budget proposal was approved in early August by Bennett’s cabinet.
He will now go to discussions in a parliamentary committee, which will prepare him for the second and third rounds of voting in the Knesset plenum.
The budget must be approved by the Knesset before the November 5 deadline, otherwise Parliament will automatically be dissolved and new elections will be called.
In the past two years of political stalemate and four elections, Israel has used a version of the state budget for 2019, which was approved in March 2018.