section_path: Prime minister (2009–2021)/Fourth term
section_name: Fourth term
paragraph_text: Fourth term
  
  In the 2015 election, Netanyahu returned with his party Likud leading the elections with 30 mandates, making it the single highest number of seats for the Knesset. President Rivlin granted Netanyahu an extension until 6 May 2015 to build a coalition when one had not been finalized in the first four weeks of negotiations. He formed a coalition government within two hours of the midnight 6 May deadline. His Likud party formed the coalition with Jewish Home, United Torah Judaism, Kulanu, and Shas.
  
  On 28 May 2015, Netanyahu announced that he would be running for an unprecedented fifth term as prime minister in the next general election and that he supports Likud's current process of picking MK candidates.
  
  In August 2015, Netanyahu's government approved a two-year budget that would see agricultural reforms and lowering of import duties to reduce food prices, deregulation of the approval process in construction to lower housing costs and speed up infrastructure building, and reforms in the financial sector to boost competition and lower fees for financial services. In the end, the government was forced to compromise by removing some key agricultural reforms.
  
  In October 2015, Netanyahu drew widespread criticism for claiming that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, gave Adolf Hitler the idea for the Holocaust in the preceding months to the Second World War, convincing the Nazi leader to exterminate Jews rather than just expel them from Europe. This idea is dismissed by mainstream historians, who note that al-Husseini's meeting with Hitler took place approximately five months after the mass murder of Jews began. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she did not accept Netanyahu's claims, and reiterated an acceptance of her country's crimes during the Nazi era. Netanyahu later explained that his "aim was not to absolve Hitler from the responsibility he bears, but to show that the father of the Palestinian nation at the time, without a state and before the 'occupation', without the territories and with the settlements, even then aspired with systemic incitement for the destruction of the Jews." Some of the strongest criticism came from Israeli academics: Yehuda Bauer said Netanyahu's claim was "completely idiotic", while Moshe Zimmermann stated that "any attempt to deflect the burden from Hitler to others is a form of Holocaust denial."
  
  In March 2016, Netanyahu's coalition faced a potential crisis as ultra-Orthodox members threatened to withdraw over the government's proposed steps to create non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall. They have stated they will leave the coalition if the government offers any further official state recognition of Conservative and Reform Judaism.
  
  On 23 December 2016, the United States, under the Obama Administration, abstained from United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, effectively allowing it to pass. On 28 December, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry strongly criticized Israel and its settlement policies in a speech. Netanyahu strongly criticized both the UN Resolution and Kerry's speech in response. On 6 January 2017, the Israeli government withdrew its annual dues from the organization, which totaled $6 million in United States dollars.
  
  On 22 February 2017, Netanyahu became the first serving prime minister of Israel to visit Australia. He was accompanied by his wife, Sara. The three-day official visit included a delegation of business representatives, and Netanyahu and Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull were scheduled to sign several bilateral agreements. Netanyahu recalled that it was the Australian Light Horse regiments that liberated Beersheba during World War I, and this began what has been a relationship of 100 years between the countries.
  
  On 12 October 2017, shortly after the United States announced the same action, Netanyahu's government announced it was leaving UNESCO due to what it saw as anti-Israel actions by the agency, and it made that decision official in December 2017. The Israeli government officially notified UNESCO of the withdrawal in late December 2017.
  
  On 30 April 2018, Netanyahu accused Iran of not holding up its end of the Iran nuclear deal after presenting a cache of over 100,000 documents detailing the extent of Iran's nuclear program. Iran denounced Netanyahu's presentation as "propaganda".
  
  Netanyahu praised the 2018 North Korea–United States summit. He said in a statement, "I commend US President Donald Trump on the historic summit in Singapore. This is an important step in the effort to rid the Korean peninsula of nuclear weapons."
  
  On 19 July 2018, the Knesset passed the Nation-State Bill, a Basic Law supported by Netanyahu's coalition government. Analysts saw the bill as a sign of Netanyahu's coalition advancing a right-wing agenda.
  
  Prior to the April 2019 Israeli legislative election, Netanyahu helped broker a deal that united the Jewish Home party with the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, in order to form the Union of the Right-Wing Parties. The motivation of the deal was to overcome the electoral threshold for smaller parties. The deal was criticized in the media, as Otzma is widely characterized as racist and traces its origins to the extremist Kahanist movement.