Thirty years ago – an eternity in geopolitics, especially in the Middle East! – formed an Israeli government supported by the 13th Knesset (Parliament) elected by the Jewish State. At the time, the two major historical formations, the Labor Party (center left, with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres) and the Likud (nationalist right of Yitzhak Shamir, then Benyamin Netanyahu), alone comprised almost two-thirds seats. Although declining, they still guided legislative life. However, the full proportional voting system, in force since the very first election of January 1, 1949, has since demonstrated its inconsistency, reminiscent of contemporary Italy or the French Fourth Republic.
For the sake of strengthening the executive, a double ballot was introduced, which involved a simultaneous double vote: one for a candidate for the post of Prime Minister, the other for the classic partisan list of 120 names for as many seats in fill in this unique chamber. Naively, the Israeli constitutionalists believed that the citizens, consistent, would grant a majority to their favorite candidate; it was precisely the opposite that took place: in 1996, 1999 and again in 2001, they voted for a man and, at the same time, for a party different from his! Thus, in 1999, the Labor Ehud Barak was elected against the candidate and outgoing Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, but without having a clear majority in an assembly where… 19 parties sat! It fell, moreover, in less than eighteen months. In 2001-2002, we therefore returned to the previous system, reinforcing it with an increase in the eligibility threshold, which went from 1% to 2% and then to 3.25% of the votes cast. The ace. The microparties aggregated among themselves by ideological affinities in order to reach the fateful bar, and the mosaic pattern of the small formations remained almost identical!
Mediocrity of the political class
This Kafkaesque arithmetic constant, reinforced by the communalization of Israeli society between Jews and Arabs, wealthy and modest, Russian speakers and others, secular and religious and even between religious themselves (religious Zionists and ultra-Orthodox), would give rise to a smile if Israel were to be in the Benelux, in Scandinavia or in the South Pacific. But in a chronically unstable and conflictual zone, and in a context of opposition with the Palestinian side (torn between the Palestinian Authority, legal and internationally recognized, and the Islamist Hamas, admitted by the West as a terrorist), the State Hebrew offers itself a dangerous democratic luxury, illustrated by the holding in the fall of 2022 of a fifth legislative election in… four years!
Fragile coalitions collapsing in the midst of negotiations with Washington and Ramallah, governments unable to pass a provisional budget, economic and social policies fluctuating according to the majorities… More and more Israelis are shying away from the consultations, tired not only of their frenetic pace , but also by the objective mediocrity of their political class. Because, once elected, a number of deputies have the unfortunate tendency to give priority to their strict community interests – like the two orthodox or Russian-speaking parties, which have become mathematically unavoidable – or, even worse, to break the law: a former president sentenced and imprisoned for rape, a former Prime Minister and a minister imprisoned for aggravated corruption, a former Prime Minister several times indicted…
Where are Begin and Golda Meir?
We are a long way from the political leaders of the first decades of the state, such as David ben Gurion, Golda Meir and other Menachem Begin, upright personalities who lived on a meager basis, concerned about the collective interest and never prosecuted. As for the rest of the contemporary political personnel, it hardly shines by its effectiveness in the search for a real peace process with the Palestinian Authority, in the reduction of social and societal gaps, nor in the radical change of a mode of outdated and incapacitating voting.
And that is the paradox of this democracy: never has the electoral system and the political leadership of Israel been so problematic, never has the Jewish state been so prosperous and powerful. Basically, this is perhaps the main strength of Israeli society and its cultural, economic and technological entrepreneurs: overcoming a rotten politico-institutional system. Until the next crisis?