The Knesset's summer session opens today with a huge question mark hanging over the future of the government.
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The opposition will put forward a motion to disperse the Knesset, which, with Ra'am still boycotting its coalition partners, is expected to pass its preliminary reading. Then again, the opposition's situation with only 54 Knesset seats isn't fantastic either. They don't have the 61 votes necessary to take the law through further readings or to replace the government in the current Knesset.
There is no governmental stability in Israel. We have just been through four rounds of elections in three years and the fifth is already looming beyond the horizon – this before the government has even completed its first year in power.
A government of change? Give me a break. This is the appropriate point time to once again raise the issue of making changes to our election system. Almost no government in Israel has managed to live out its days, something that points to a need for change. We need a system that is suitable for Israel and all its tribes. A system that on the one hand will guarantee stability and on the other will provide appropriate representation for all sectors of society.
The plurality of parties in Israel is the root of all evil. The inflection point was in 1992 when direct prime ministerial elections were instituted. This enabled Israeli citizens to cast one ballot for prime minister and another for a party. The law was supposed to be the first stage in an overall reform of the system of government.
Three prime ministers were elected directly – Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon – but the reform was condemned to failure because no changes were made to how MKs are elected. In 2003, during Ariel Sharon's tenure as prime minister, with the agreement of the opposition, the direct ballot for prime minister was annulled and we returned to the previous system.
But Israel's citizens had become used to being able to vote for a party that exactly fits their worldview. This led to a fragmentation of the political system with shards of parties on the Left and Right. In the United States, Great Britain, and Germany there are only two parties and only four parties competed in the recent French presidential elections. That's the way it works in most of the democratic world – citizens choose between two or three parties. In Israel. On the other hand, there are at least 10 Knesset parties and dozens of parties stand on the starting line on election day.
Even raising the electoral threshold to 3.25% wasn't enough. With a wide dispersion of votes, the ability to put together a functioning coalition shrinks. Raising the threshold by another%age point may lead more parties to find a wider common denominator and at the end of the day to unite. Israel should not have more than four parties: Center-Right, Center-Left, ultra-Orthodox, and Arab. There is no real answer to the question of why Labor, Meretz, Blue and White, and Yesh Atid don't run on one center-left ticket like the Democratic Party in the United States.
There is no real reason either why Likud, Yamina, New Hope, Israel Beiteinu, and some of the Religious Zionists can't run on under a Center-Right flag like the Republicans in the United States. Even with a magnifying glass one couldn't find the truthfully find the difference between New Hope, Likud, and Yamina. The only thing preventing this is the desire of Gideon Sa'ar and Naftali Bennett not to work with Netanyahu.
United Torah Judaism and Shas, in its current ultra-Orthodox format, can run together and realize their full potential, In the Arab sector as well, a common denominator can be found between Ra'am and the Joint Arab List to bring them together to work for the benefit of their voters. After all, MK Mansour Abbas has proved that if there's a will, there's a way.
A return to direct prime ministerial elections would not necessarily be a bad thing. It allows the electorate to vote for who they really want as prime minister in a similar fashion to what happens in local authority elections. But we must complete the reform in the way MKs are elected, and as part of this integrate national and regional elections, something that will provide a response to the need for appropriate representation for all parts of Israeli society, or, unfortunately, to determine that the mandate to form a government will be tasked to the leader of one of the two biggest parties. That alone will lead the parties to unite.
What is required is courage from political leaders on both sides to agree to change reality and not just their political situation.
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