Category: News

Broadway theaters will be allowed to drop their mask mandates starting July 1, the Broadway League announced Tuesday.

The League described the new policy as “mask optional,” and said it would be re-evaluated monthly.

Broadway had maintained fairly restrictive audience policies since theaters reopened last summer. The theaters required patrons to show proof of vaccination until April 30, and have continued to require patrons to wear masks except while eating and drinking.

Broadway’s public health protocols have taken on an outsize role in the performing arts, as many other institutions have taken their cues from the big theaters. Broadway theaters imposed a vaccine mandate before New York City did the same for restaurants, gyms, and other indoor performances, and then maintained their rules long after the city stopped requiring them.

Mask wearing became part of the theatergoing experience this season: sign-wielding employees walked the aisles reminding patrons of the requirement, and reminders to wear masks were added to the usual preshow announcements about turning off mobile phones and banning photography. When theaters first reopened, some did not sell food and drink to avoid interfering with mask-wearing; the consumption of refreshments now provides a noticeable loophole for those who don’t like wearing masks.

Some other performing arts venues, including many Off Broadway theaters, continue to ask for proof of vaccination and to mandate masks, and public transit in New York continues to require masks indoors, although compliance is dropping. But many other corners of society, including domestic air travel, have dropped mask mandates.

There are currently 27 shows running in Broadway’s 41 theaters.

The four nonprofit organizations that operate six of the Broadway houses hung onto vaccine mandates longer than the commercial landlords who operate the majority of the theaters. But none of the nonprofits currently has a show running on Broadway, and none plans to resume producing on Broadway until September.

Reaction was, predictably, polarized, with some cheering what they saw as an overdue step, and others ruing a retreat they viewed as reckless.

Jeffrey Eric Jenkins, a frequent Broadway theatergoer as a Tony voter and professor of theater studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, said he would continue to wear a mask while seeing shows. “It’s important, when you have people packed that tightly together, to control the flow of airborne germs at a time when we don’t know what the long-term effect of Covid is going to be,” he said.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that Maine may not exclude religious schools from a state tuition program. The decision, from a court that has grown exceptionally receptive to claims from religious people and groups in a variety of settings, was the latest in a series of rulings requiring the government to aid religious institutions on the same terms as other private organizations.

The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent.

The case, Carson v. Makin, No. 20-1088, arose from an unusual program in Maine, which requires rural communities without public secondary schools to arrange for their young residents’ educations in one of two ways. They can sign contracts with nearby public schools, or they can pay tuition at a private school chosen by parents so long as it is, in the words of a state law, “a nonsectarian school in accordance with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Two families in Maine that send or want to send their children to religious schools challenged the law, saying it violated their right to freely exercise their faith.

One of the schools at issue in the case, Temple Academy in Waterville, Maine, says it expects its teachers “to integrate biblical principles with their teaching in every subject” and teaches students “to spread the word of Christianity.” The other, Bangor Christian Schools, says it seeks to develop “within each student a Christian worldview and Christian philosophy of life.”

The two schools “candidly admit that they discriminate against homosexuals, individuals who are transgender and non-Christians,” Maine’s Supreme Court brief said.

The case was broadly similar to one from Montana decided by the court in 2020, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. In that case, the court ruled that states must allow religious schools to participate in programs that provide scholarships to students attending private schools.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority in the Montana case, said a provision of the state’s Constitution banning aid to schools run by churches ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion by discriminating against religious people and schools.

“A state need not subsidize private education,” the chief justice wrote. “But once a state decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

But the Montana decision turned on the schools’ religious status, not their curriculums. There may be a difference, Chief Justice Roberts said, between an institution’s religious identity and its conduct.

“We acknowledge the point,” he wrote, “but need not examine it here.”

The new case from Maine resolved that open question.

The Supreme Court has long held that states may choose to provide aid to religious schools along with other private schools. The question in the cases from Montana and Maine was the opposite one: May states refuse to provide such aid if it is made available to other private schools?

Voters in Alabama and Georgia will make their final selections on Tuesday in congressional runoffs — including a particularly hard-fought battle for the Senate in Alabama — and Virginia primary voters will select party nominees for two of the most closely watched House races in the country.

Here is what to watch for on a Southern-accented Primary Day.

The end of the line for Mo Brooks?

Republican voters in Alabama could be forgiven for their confusion over their party’s nominee for an open Senate seat. Former President Donald J. Trump, a popular figure in the state, endorsed Representative Mo Brooks for the job after he emerged as an unwavering acolyte and a stalwart supporter of Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods.

The former president then withdrew his endorsement as Mr. Brooks lagged in the polls, and finally threw his support to Katie Britt, a former chief of staff for Senator Richard Shelby, who is retiring.

On Tuesday, Ms. Britt and Mr. Brooks meet in a runoff that will determine the prohibitive favorite to become Alabama’s next senator. Recent polling indicated Ms. Britt has a commanding lead.

It’s MAGA vs. the G.O.P. mainstream in Virginia’s Second District.

The special masters who drew up Virginia’s new House districts dealt a very bad hand to one incumbent: Representative Elaine Luria, a Democrat. Her home in Norfolk was removed from her Tidewater district, and a good deal of rural terrain was added to the seat. Once slightly Republican, her district, Virginia’s Second, became considerably more so.

The two main Republicans vying to take her on are State Senator Jen Kiggans, who has the backing of Republican leadership in Washington, and Jarome Bell, who has the backing of the state congressional delegation’s most conservative Republican, Bob Good, and members of the Trump world.

Ms. Kiggans, Mr. Bell and Ms. Luria are all Navy veterans in a district where one in five voters are on active duty in the military or are veterans. What separates the three is ideology, with Mr. Bell campaigning on Mr. Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

There are echoes of Youngkin in a contest to take on Spanberger.

In another year, the new boundaries of Representative Abigail Spanberger’s Seventh District would be seen as shoring up her standing as the incumbent Democrat, shifting her from a Republican-leaning map to a slightly Democratic one. But this isn’t another year, and six Republicans are lined up to take advantage of the conditions favoring their party nationally and take a crack at her.

Bryce Reeves, a state senator and former narcotics officer and Army veteran, calls himself the front-runner, but he has plenty of competition. Crystal Vanuch, chairwoman of the Stafford County Board of Supervisors, has latched onto the winning social themes of Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s race in 2021: parental control of education and barring critical race theory from schools. Derrick Anderson is a combat veteran and former Green Beret, and Yesli Vega, a sheriff’s deputy, headed Latinos for Youngkin last year.

Two Black Republicans aim for House seats in Georgia.

Runoffs in Georgia for Republican nominees for House seats feature two Black candidates with different prospects and different stories.

In Southwest Georgia’s new Second District, Republican leaders would very much like Jeremy Hunt, a moderate-sounding political newcomer, to take on the endangered, longtime incumbent Black Democrat, Sanford Bishop.

But first, Mr. Hunt, a West Point graduate and former Army captain who served at Fort Benning, must get past Chris West, an Air National Guard officer who is white and running on photos showing him with Mr. Trump.

In Georgia’s 10th District, meanwhile, Vernon Jones, a longtime Democratic politician who endorsed Mr. Trump in 2020 and then became a Republican, is running with Mr. Trump’s backing after being pushed out of the primary for Senate.

But in something of a rerun proxy war between Mr. Trump and Georgia’s Republican establishment, Gov. Brian Kemp — who defied Mr. Trump and overcame a primary challenge from former Senator David Perdue that the former president engineered — has backed the other Republican in the runoff, Mike Collins, as have most of the Republicans who helped Mr. Kemp win his primary in a landslide.

Mr. Collins has also brought up a 2004 claim that Mr. Jones sexually assaulted a woman, a charge that the woman dropped although never recanted. Mr. Jones has said the encounter was consensual, and in a statement after Mr. Kemp sided with his rival he boasted of his outsider status.

“I’m not running for Congress to join the establishment,” he said. “I’m running for Congress to destroy it.”

Georgia could rebuff Trump again.

In Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, which was redrawn to be overwhelmingly Republican, another candidate endorsed by Mr. Trump, Jake Evans, faces possible defeat.

Mr. Evans, a lawyer who stepped down last year as chairman of the Georgia ethics commission, barely made the runoff against Rich McCormick, a Marine pilot and emergency-room doctor who was by far the top vote-getter on May 24.

Dr. McCormick may not be Mr. Trump’s choice, but he is no moderate: He has campaigned against what he calls President Biden’s “unrelenting assault on our core values.” He has the backing of the House’s No. 2 Republican, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

LONDON — Britain was crippled on Tuesday morning by its largest railway strike in three decades, halting trains across the country, throwing travel plans for tens of millions of Britons and visitors into chaos, and setting off what union leaders warned could be the beginning of a summer of labor unrest.

With last-ditch talks between the main union and the railway operator collapsing on Monday night, most trains ground to a halt for the first of three days of strikes. Most train service will also likely be halted on Thursday and Saturday, with delays and disruptions rippling across the system for the entire week.

In London, workers in the Underground system went on strike Tuesday in a separate wage dispute, threatening to bring much of the capital to a halt as well. Buses continued to run, and there was some skeleton train service.

The strikes are a major test for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who called on the unions to compromise on their wage demands at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has kept ridership and ticket revenue well below normal levels.

So far, the government has refused to intervene directly in the talks, which are between the unions and Network Rail, a company that manages the country’s railway system, as well as the privatized train operators.

But with soaring food and fuel prices and wages that are failing to keep pace, Mr. Johnson will confront restive workers in multiple industries. Teachers, airline employees and criminal defense lawyers are among those who are threatening to walk off the job.

The main railway union, the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, known as the R.M.T., is demanding a pay rise in line with the cost of living. At a combative news conference on Monday, Mick Lynch, the union’s general secretary, blamed the “dead hand” of the government for the impasse.

A day earlier, Mr. Lynch told Sky News that a deal should have been done in December, when the retail price index, a measure of inflation, was at 7 percent. Since then, the annual rate spiked to 11.1 percent in April, the highest since 1982. The latest wage increase offered by the train operators is far lower than that.

In remarks released by Downing Street on Monday night, Mr. Johnson blamed the R.M.T., saying it wanted to pass unacceptable fare increases on to passengers and preserve work practices that date back to the Victorian era.

“The unions are harming the very people they claim to be helping,” the prime minister said. “By going ahead with these rail strikes, they are driving away commuters who ultimately support the jobs of rail workers, whilst also impacting businesses and communities across the country.”

“Too high demands on pay will also make it incredibly difficult to bring to an end the current challenges facing families around the world with rising costs of living,” Mr. Johnson said. “Now is the time to come to a sensible compromise for the good of the British people and the rail work force.”

Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party faces critical parliamentary elections on Thursday for two seats that have come open, and the strikes quickly became a political football. The opposition Labour Party accused the Conservative government of failing to break the deadlock. The Conservatives said Labour was cheering on a walkout that will inconvenience millions of people and impede Britain’s recovery from the pandemic.

In Wakefield, one of the two districts holding elections, a major local bus company has already been on strike for several days.

Britain is locked in the same economic vise of rising prices and lagging wage growth that is afflicting countries around the world. When adjusted for inflation, pay is declining at the fastest pace in more than a decade — a problem that is likely to worsen as prices continue to rise and spread to more goods and services.

The disruption of global supply chains, following the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has pushed up prices for oil, natural gas, wheat and fertilizer. Fuel and food prices are rising at rates unseen in decades. In Britain, the squeeze on incomes has forced a reluctant government to offer financial aid to households.

Economists worry that the cost of living will constrain consumer spending, endanger fragile businesses and throw the economy into a recession. Britain’s economy showed signs of weakness in the first three months of the year.

At the same time, policymakers are concerned about rising prices becoming embedded in the economy, as companies increase their prices because of higher costs and workers demand higher wages.

Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, said earlier this year that there needed to be “restraint” in wage bargaining, otherwise inflation would get worse, especially among high earners.

Moreover, industries have lost workers to illness or other jobs during the pandemic, leading to serious staff shortages. In London, Heathrow and other airports are asking carriers to cancel flights during the summer travel season because of a shortage of baggage handlers and other workers.

Employers are competing for staff with bonuses and wage increases, but workers are not feeling the benefits as inflation eats away at those extra gains. Other unions, including those representing teachers and National Health Service workers, are threatening to go on strike if wage agreements do not keep pace with inflation.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has emerged from the Jan. 6 hearings in a peculiar position.

To some Democrats in Congress, he has become something of a hero for resisting Donald J. Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election at a time when American democracy seemed to teeter on the brink. To Mr. Trump and his political base, Mr. Pence is a weakling who gave away the presidency. And to a swath of anti-Trump voters in both parties, he is merely someone who finally did the right thing by standing up to his former boss — years too late, after willingly defending or ignoring some of Mr. Trump’s earlier excesses.

The whipsaw of images creates an uncertain foundation for a potential presidential campaign, for which Mr. Pence has been laying the groundwork. Yet the former vice president is continuing with his travels around the country in advance of the 2024 primaries, as he navigates his fraught positioning.

Much as he did after the 2020 election, when he tried to keep his tensions with Mr. Trump from becoming public only to have him push them into the light, Mr. Pence continues to walk a tightrope, trying to make the best of a situation he didn’t seek without becoming openly adversarial to the president with whom he served and who remains the leader of the Republican Party.

Mr. Pence himself has said little about Jan. 6, though his aides have testified about his resolve as Mr. Trump and his allies tried to press him to subvert President Biden’s victory. On Monday, in an economic speech at the University Club of Chicago, Mr. Pence sounded very much like a candidate — but not much like someone interested in discussing the specifics of what he lived through on Jan. 6.

“We’ve all been through a lot over the last several years,” Mr. Pence told the audience. “A global pandemic, social unrest, a divisive election, a tragic day in our nation’s capital — and an administration seemingly every day driving our economy into the abyss of a socialist welfare state.”

Insights into Mr. Pence’s mind-set at the time have come largely from the testimony of his former chief of staff, Marc Short, and of his former counsel, Greg Jacob. Mr. Pence, as he made clear in his Chicago speech, has kept his sights trained on the Biden administration and on electing Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia and others who were sharply at odds with Mr. Trump, in the midterms. If Mr. Pence has sharper things to say, he may not do so until the fall, when he has a book coming out.

“The situation Mike Pence faces is a political briar patch,” said David Kochel, a Republican strategist who worked on Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign in 2016. “The more he’s praised by Democrats and the media for doing the right thing on Jan. 6, the more some in Trump’s base grow skeptical of his loyalty to the Trump team.” He added, “There is no upside for him to lean into any of this.”

Later on Monday in Peoria, Ill., Mr. Pence called on Republicans to focus on the future and not the 2020 presidential election, an indirect reference to Mr. Trump’s incessant focus on his election loss that continues to this day.

“In the days between now and Election Day, let’s cast a positive vision for the future for the American people,” Mr. Pence told a crowd of Republican activists at a Lincoln Day dinner. “Yes, let’s be the loyal opposition. Let’s hold the other side accountable every single day. In the days between now and Election Day, we need you to say yes — yes to the future, yes to a future of freedom and our cherished values. And the Republican Party must be the party of the future.”

Three times Mr. Pence lauded accomplishments of “the Trump-Pence administration” and he related a story from his high school reunion about a former classmate who encouraged him by telling him, “We need you guys back.”

During the speech, Kathy Sparrow, the chairwoman of the Republican Party of Hancock County, Ill., shouted “Pence for president!” Mr. Pence ignored the shout.

“Trump had his turn,” Ms. Sparrow said after Mr. Pence’s remarks. “It’s time for Pence to step up and run.”

The attention on Mr. Pence provides both potential benefit and peril as he considers running for president.

Paeans from Democrats certainly do not help him, but his actions before, during and after Jan. 6 give him an opportunity to differentiate himself in what could be a crowded primary field, one that may include Mr. Trump. Mr. Pence, whose support for Mr. Trump helped allay concerns about him from evangelical voters in 2016, has the advantage of starting as a known entity to the Republican base.

Mr. Pence has tried to stake out a lane for himself by representing the aspects of the Trump White House that appealed to conservatives but without the coarse and sometimes abusive behavior from Mr. Trump that they grew weary of. But this approach has been complicated by the fact that the loudest praise for Mr. Pence has come from Democrats who voted to impeach Mr. Trump.

“In a time of absolutely scandalous betrayal of people’s oaths of office and crimes being committed all over the place, somebody who does their job and sticks to the law will stand out as a hero on that day,” Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks, said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. “And on that day, he was a hero.”

Many other Democrats, however, have resisted the idea that Mr. Pence — who is known as cautious and loyal, and who did not break with Mr. Trump until the very end — should be praised, particularly as he considers campaigning to be the next president.

“Pence is currently on his own political rehab tour, hoping he can wash the stink of being Trump’s vice president off,” the Arizona Democratic Party said in a blast email when Mr. Pence made a trip to the southern border in that state recently. “But we know just because Mike Pence didn’t give in on January 6 doesn’t change the fact he missed multiple opportunities to do the right thing for 4 whole years.”

Other Democrats, including the members of the Democratic National Committee, have highlighted that Mr. Pence adhered closely to Mr. Trump without wavering during some of the biggest controversies of his presidency, including his first impeachment, and that Mr. Pence did not speak publicly about his views until moments before the election certification began on Jan. 6.

Nonetheless, even some of the harshest critics of the Trump era have said that the actions of Jan. 6 should not be treated lightly.

“It’s true that for months before the election and weeks after, Mike Pence played along with Trump’s baseless election conspiracies,” said David Axelrod, a former top adviser to former President Barack Obama. “He certainly didn’t dissent. But, at the end of the day, he’ll be remembered for one critical moment when he resisted enormous pressure and literally put his life on the line for our democracy. And, for that, he deserves all the accolades he’s received.”

The complaints from Democrats have focused not just on his tolerance for Mr. Trump’s norm-shattering behavior but also for the administration’s policies. Mr. Pence’s aides say he believed the administration was enacting policies he generally agreed with, including putting forward conservative nominees for three Supreme Court seats. His long loyalty to Mr. Trump could resonate with some Republicans, but, with the former president demanding total fealty, it is a difficult line to walk.

“The irony is that Pence was arguably the primary enabler of Trump,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist based in California. “He was the mainstream traditional conservative Republican who would go to donors and not just defend Trump and his policies, but with a straight face insist that Donald J. Trump was a good man.”

Mr. Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, has been critical of aspects of the House committee’s work, at a time when Mr. Trump has encouraged his supporters to view the panel as illegitimate. That has allowed Mr. Pence to keep some distance from the work of the committee, which he has not appeared before himself.

Officials are expected to try again to ask Mr. Pence to testify, a move he will most likely resist. On Sunday, Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and a committee member, left open the idea that requesting his presence may still happen.

“Certainly a possibility,” Mr. Schiff said. “We’re not excluding anyone or anything at this point.”

Maggie Haberman reported from New York, and Reid J. Epstein from Peoria, Ill.

The Kremlin’s chief spokesman told NBC News on Monday that two American fighters who went missing in Ukraine, Alex Drueke, 39, and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh, 27, were “soldiers of fortune,” and had been taken into custody. The spokesman also claimed that the two men were not protected by Geneva Conventions as prisoners of war.

In the first comments the Kremlin has made about the two men, the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that they had been involved in shelling and firing on Russian forces and should be “held responsible for the crimes they have committed.” He said they were being held while their case was investigated.

The U.S. State Department released a statement urging Moscow and the authorities in Russian-occupied Ukraine to abide by international law. “We call on the Russian government — as well as its proxies — to live up to their international obligations in their treatment of any individual, including those captured fighting in Ukraine,” the statement from the State Department press office said.

The families of the men reported them missing last week, and on Saturday the State Department described them as “reportedly captured by Russia’s military forces in Ukraine.” Both are U.S. military veterans who volunteered to fight in Ukraine.

The two were fighting with a small group of foreign soldiers and went missing in action when their platoon came under heavy fire in a village near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, which is about 25 miles from the Russian border.

Under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war must be treated humanely and are protected from prosecution for taking part in hostilities. The only exception is prosecutions on war crimes charges.

But Mr. Peskov said the men were not part of the Ukrainian army and so were not entitled to Geneva Convention protections granted to combatants. Mr. Drueke is a former U.S. Army staff sergeant who served two tours in Iraq, while Mr. Huynh is a former Marine.

The case of the two men has underlined the perils facing thousands of foreign volunteers who have gone to fight in Ukraine. Earlier this month, a court in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine sentenced three foreign fighters to death, accusing the men, from Britain and Morocco, of being mercenaries who intended to carry out terrorist acts. Legal experts said the trial and draconian sentences appeared calculated as a warning to foreign volunteers not to take up arms against Russia.

The State Department said on Saturday that it had reviewed photos and videos online that appeared to show the two Americans, although it declined to comment on the authenticity of the images or on the men’s conditions.

American officials were in contact with the men’s families, the Ukrainian authorities and the International Committee of the Red Cross, a State Department spokesman said.

On Friday, short videos purporting to show the two men were posted on YouTube in which they each said in Russian, “I am against war.” It was unclear when the videos were recorded or by whom.

Then the Russian state broadcaster RT said it had interviewed the men. The broadcaster reported that the two men had surrendered to Russian troops and were at a detention center controlled by Russian-allied forces.

Three people were in critical condition on Monday afternoon after a taxi jumped the sidewalk in Manhattan’s Flatiron district. The driver hit a cyclist and several pedestrians with his vehicle, the authorities said.

Around 1 p.m., according to the Fire Department, the driver crashed his car into a building near 29th Street and Broadway, an area packed with bars, restaurants and hotels. Police officials were investigating the cause of the collision, which they believe for now to be an accident.

As the driver turned left onto Broadway, the police said, his cab hit a cyclist and veered onto the sidewalk. The vehicle then accelerated and pushed two women against a wall.

Mamadou Barry, 40, was among the pedestrians who watched the collision unfold. He said that the cyclist remained conscious, but with his arm twisted in an unnatural way.

Mr. Barry joined more than a dozen other bystanders to move the cab away to free a victim who had been crushed. As pedestrians screamed, Mr. Barry looked away, not wanting to see the extent of the injuries. “It was scary,” he said.

Deputy Chief John Chell of the Police Department said at a news conference that “a remarkable scene took place: About 15 to 20 New Yorkers attempted to pick this cab off these women.”

The Police Department was investigating whether the accident was caused by the driver having experienced a “medical episode,” a spokesman said earlier on Monday.

At least six people were injured and taken to the hospital, including the taxi driver, according to the authorities. Three had life-threatening injuries.

The cab was still on the scene at about 3 p.m., near a juice store and a dessert shop. The driver’s door was open, next to a crumpled bicycle in the green bike lane.

JERUSALEM — Israel’s governing coalition will vote to dissolve Parliament within the next week, bringing down the government and sending the country to a fifth election in three years, the prime minister’s office and two coalition officials said on Monday.

The decision throws a political lifeline to Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister who left office last June upon the formation of the current government, and whose party is currently leading in the polls.

It follows weeks of paralysis caused by the defection of two right-wing government lawmakers and frequent rebellions by three others, removing the coalition’s majority in Parliament and making it hard to govern.

Expected to be held in the fall, the election will be Israel’s fifth since April 2019. It comes at an already tense time for the country, after a rise in Palestinian attacks on Israelis put pressure on the government, and amid an escalation in a shadow war between Israel and Iran.

The terms of the current coalition agreement dictate that in the event that right-wing defections prompt early elections, Yair Lapid, the foreign minister and a centrist former broadcaster, would take over as interim prime minister while Prime Minister Naftali Bennett would step aside. If that agreement is honored, Mr. Lapid will lead the government for at least several months, through the election campaign and the protracted coalition negotiations likely to follow.

The government was fragile to begin with because of the ideological incompatibility of its eight constituent parties — a fractious alliance of right-wing, left-wing, secular, religious and Arab groups that joined forces only last June after four inconclusive elections in two years had left Israel without a state budget or a functional government.

The coalition was cohesive enough to pass a new budget, Israel’s first in more than three years; make key administrative appointments; and deepen Israel’s emerging relationships with key Arab states. But its members clashed regularly over the rights of Israel’s Arab minority, the relationship between religion and state, and settlement policy in the occupied West Bank — clashes that ultimately led two key members to defect, and others to vote against government bills.

The coalition’s members agreed to team up last year only because of a shared desire to oust Mr. Netanyahu, the right-wing former prime minister. Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal to resign despite standing trial for corruption had alienated many of his natural allies on the right, leading some of them to ally with their ideological opponents to remove him from office.

The new election gives another chance to Mr. Netanyahu, allowing him another attempt to win enough votes to form his own majority coalition. But his path back to power is far from clear.

Polls suggest that his party, Likud, will easily be the largest in the next Parliament, but its allies may not have enough seats to let Mr. Netanyahu assemble a parliamentary majority. Some parties may also only agree to work with Likud if Mr. Netanyahu steps down as party leader.

This dynamic may lead to months of protracted coalition negotiations, returning Israel to the stasis it fell into before Mr. Netanyahu’s departure, when his government lacked the cohesion to enact a national budget or fill key positions in the civil service.