Israel's Election Produces No Clear Winner

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

Israel’s electoral system is a pure party-list proportional representation one. There are no individual constituencies. Instead, each party presents a list of candidates and the electors vote for the party list, and not for a particular person on the list.

The parties gain seats in the 120-member parliament in direct proportion to the overall national vote they received. If a party gains ten percent of the vote, they will have 12 members in the Knesset.

Obviously, there are some advantages to such a process: no votes are “wasted,” assuming a party passes a threshold and wins at least two per cent of the overall vote total.

But the disadvantages are glaring. The result is a multi-party system based on coalition governments, as no party has ever won a majority of seats in a national election. Parties rise and fall, winning large numbers of seats in one election and then virtually disappearing in the next.

The Jan. 22 election followed this pattern. Two parties that didn’t even exist a few years ago emerged as major players this time around.

One of them is Yesh Atid (There is a Future), which took 19 seats and has become the second-largest party in the Knesset, after first-place Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing Likud-Yisrael Beitenu coalition, which lost 11 seats and ended up with only 31 – obviously very far from a majority.

Yesh Atid’s leader, Yair Lapid, is a media personality and the son of the late journalist and politician Yosef Lapid, who once led a similar party years ago. Founded last year, Yesh Atid is a centrist and secularist party.

The party’s stance regarding the issue of relations with the Palestinians is somewhat oblique, though it does support the so-called “two-state solution.” Domestically, Yesh Atid’s demands include better public education and more equitable economic policies.

The other big winner is a new right-wing party, Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) led by Naftali Bennett, with 12 seats. Formed in 2008, its program calls for eventual annexation of the West Bank and much of its support comes from the Jewish settlements there.

Three predominantly Israeli Arab parties also got a combined total of 11 seats.

The venerable Labour Party won a respectable 15 seats and its leader, Shelly Yachimovich, will probably become leader of the opposition. Kadima, which as recently as 2006 was the largest party in parliament with 29 seats, and led a coalition government, barely made the two percent threshold this time, with two seats. It is now the smallest party in the Knesset.

Most observers see Lapid as the chief power broker in the formation of the next governing coalition. His vote came predominantly from the Tel Aviv area, Israel’s biggest (and most liberal) city.

Should Netanyahu ask Lapid to join him in a broad coalition, it will move Israeli politics to the left of where it has been in recent years. (And it would also probably gain the support of two smaller left-centre groupings, Hatnuah and Meretz, which have 12 seats between them.)

On the other hand, the prime minister might lurch further to the political right, by asking Bennett to join a coalition government, with the hope that the religious parties and others provide it with parliamentary support.

The next few weeks will be a political juggling act for Netanyahu.

But he’s been through this before.