(Last update: March 19, 2021)
My wife and I made aliyah to israel more than 10 years ago. Since a Prime Minister's term in Israel is supposed to be four years, we should have seen only two national elections during these past ten+ years--or, alternatively, we might have expected to see perhaps three such elections, depending on when in a four-year election cycle we came here.
But we haven't seen two (or three) national elections since we came in 2010. We've seen five elections. Number six will be held next week, March 23rd. Why? Because Israel has a broken election system.
This is a problem. A broken election system means a broken democracy (here).
In a democracy, national elections give citizens the power to choose their national leader. Indeed, national elections are, arguably, the most fundamental characteristic of a democracy.
But Israel's election system fails to grant this right to its citizens. It fails democracy's most basic test.
Israel's elections do not empower Israeli voters. It disenfranchises them. That is, an Israeli election takes the power of the ballot box away from voters and hands the actual selection of a Prime Minister to others.
This is the first hint that Israel's voters may be disenfranchised. It isn't the only such hint.
As I have written before, the first thing that happens in Israel after election results are in is that everyone turns away from the voters' choice to focus instead on the nation's unelected President. His job is, essentially, to push the voters' choice aside. Ignoring ballot box results, he consults (by law) with all political Parties which have succeeded in getting elected into the Knesset during that election. He asks the leader of each political Party in the Knesset just one question: who will you support to be Prime Minister?
Voter disenfranchisement begins here because the candidate with the most votes is not entitled to the support of any political Party in the Knesset except, of course, from his own Party, of which he is the leader (which means he gets to name himself as the candidate he will support for national leader). In fact, to answer the President's question (about whom to name to be national leader) Party leaders in the Knesset can choose anyone for Prime Minister, including themselves. The voters' ballot box choice is ignored.
The President's goal with his one question is to find out which candidate in the recent election will be supported by the most political Party leaders. Each Party leader controls --on paper, at least--Knesset seats his own Party has won in the recent election. Typically, a political Party in the Knesset will control anywhere between 4 and 30+ seats. The President's job is to tally the number of seats Party leaders say they will 'commit' to the candidate in question.
Here is where a voter gets a second hint he has been disenfranchised. Israel's President has to make a decision about which political Party leader in the Knesset he will ask to form a "coalition government" for Israel. He is not obligated to choose the obvious vote winner.
No one in Israel can become Prime Minister until he demonstrates to our President that he can attract enough Party leaders to commit at least 61 Knesset "seats" to him. There are 120 seats total in the Knesset. Therefore, 61 seats means a majority. It means a candidate with 61 seats (in theory) "loyal" to him through agreements with Party leaders will--in theory--"control" a majority of the Knesset.The candidate who can do that becomes Israel's national leader.
To understand how this part of Israel's election process disenfranchises Israel's voter, look at what happened after last year's election (March 2020). First. the two leading vote-getters in that election were Benjamin Netanyahu and his major rival at that time, Benny Gantz. Netanyahu won the most votes of the election. Gantz won the second most votes. Netanyahu's Party won 36 seats in the Knesset, the largest number of any Party. Gantz's Party was runner-up, with 33 seats.
If the President's task was just to do arithmetic, Netanyahu would have gotten the nod to attempt to form a coalition government--because the arithmetic said the important numbers--vote total and seats won--clearly favored Netanyahu. But he didn't get that nod. Benny Gantz got it.
The reason Gantz got the nod to attempt to form a government is simple: the President's role in this part of the election process isn't about numbers. It certainly isn't about total votes in the election. It's about who the President feels has the best chance to get the commitments needed to attract the 61 seats necessary to become Prime Minister.
Put another way, the reason this part of the election process disenfranchises the voter is that it depends not on a ballot box vote count. It relies only upon one unelected man's feelings. Feelings. Those feelings focus on one idea: which candidate does the President feel has the best chance to gather in those 61 "commitments". Vote count--or, what the voters felt when they went to the ballot box--is irrelevant.
The President's involvement in our election process seems to be a form of voter disenfranchisemen because it takes the country's selection process completely out of the voters' hands. But--worse than than--it introduces the selection process to what some might call a form of political corruption. Israel's election process requires the candidate to work with politicial rivals to manipulate the election's purpose for Party leaders own, private gain.
Typically, an Israeli Knesset will have 10-12 Parties. This number can, of course fluctuate. In 2020, Gantz had to talk to something like 10 Party leaders to see who would help him form a 61-seat majority.
The need to pass through such a "consultation" process is the second hint that Israel's voters get disenfranchised.
This part of Israel's election process works like this: once Israel's President chooses one candidate to make the attempt to convince enough of his political rivals to "join" with him to form a ruling coalition of at least 61 seats, the candidate begins what might be called either politics-at-its-best or, alternatively, politics-at-its-worst. What happens in practice, however, isn't so much politics as it is a political form of "horse-trading".
For this political version of "horse-trading", each Party leader who has told the President that he supports the candidate in question will now officially meet with that candidate. In 2020, that meant something like 10 individual meetings with Benny Gantz. At these meetings, each Party leader was to make his case for helping the candidate to create a ruling coalition. Party leaders typically make their case by asking the candidate just one question: how many Government Ministries will you give to my Party to control in order to convince me to join your government?
The problem with this "horse-trading" is that a candidate has campaigned for office on a political platform. That platform lays out what will be--at least in theory--the candidate's plan to govern. But this horse-trading subverts that plan. Party leaders are not interested in the candidate's plan to govern. They are interested in their own plans. They will never join with anyone who refuses to bend his campaign promises to meet the needs of the Party leader.
These meetings, in other words, rewrite what a candidate can do in office. The candidate, through those Ministrry appointments, esse ntially gives up his control of those Ministries to rivals, most of whom absolutely have their own ideas about what they want to do.
This may be why, in Israel, there used to be a saying: "if you vote Left, you will get a Leftitst government. If you vote Right, you will get a Leftist government".
For most politicians in Israel, getting to be Prime Minister is not so much based on the ability to attract voters, as much as it is based on how well you can bastardize your governing political agenda to get those 61 seats.
This is not how a democracy is supposed to work. But it is how Israel's election system works. It was what Gantz had to experience on his way to securing the right to be named Prime Minister.
Gantz got the nod to seek those seats, all right. But he couldn't do it. He could not attract the commitments he needed. He failed.
That meant that the President had to make that same decision again, this time without Gantz in the mix (he had just failed). Once again, Netanyahu was the obvious choice. But the President was not obligated to choose him. He could have chosen anyone.
In the end, Netanyahu got that chance. He made it work. But while he was able to form a coalition government, he couldn't create a coalition that could actually work together. The government failed. Hence, next week's election.
In Israel, voters do not select their Prime Minister. The unelected President, along with politicians in the Knesset get that power.
In Israel, the country's unelected President has what is, for all intents and purposes, the final say in our election process. Certainly, by the time the President gets involved in the process--days, if not weeks after the election has ended--the voters' wishes have been completely forgotten. This is called voter disenfranchisement.
Today, Israel is less than a week away from another election. Netanyahu could be next week's winner. If he wins again, he will again need to attract those 61 seats.
This--attracting those 61 seats--is where Israel's voters will be trashed. If voters going to the polls choose Netanyahu again to lead this country, that wish will be ignored: there are simply too many politicans who hate Netanyahu so much they say they will not help him to form a new government. Their own campaigns have been based on this claim. They want him gone--the voters be damned. They even ran on "anyone-but-Bibi" platforms.
The voice of Israel's voters will be silenced. Yet again, Israel's voters will be disenfranchised.
This is not how a democracy is supposed to work. But it is how a badly run democracy-in-name-only works. It is also how Israel's so-called "defenders of democracy" use their personal, selfish goals and hatreds to both ignore the people's will and drive Israel to the precipice of political paralysis.
The moral of this story is this: it is possible that the Final Jewish Redemption will, ultimately, repudiate many of the ideas of Western Liberalism, including how a government is supposed to look. Will this election crisis turn out to be the catalyst that provokes for Israel that repudiation process?
Stay tuned. Maybe we'll get lucky next week. Perhaps our fourth election in two years won't turn out to be yet another election failure. Then again...
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