Seeker Blog

More analysis of the dysfunctional Israeli political system

…At a deeper level, however, it is the political system itself that is chronically dysfunctional. When Israel was a newborn country fighting for survival, it had no time to devise an appropriate political model, so it went for pure proportional representation, practised almost nowhere else in the world. In a recent edition of Azure, a liberal-right Israeli journal, Amotz Asa-El, a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, summed up the results:

This system has been depleting Israel’s political energies for decades: it radicalised the territorial debate, debilitated the economy, obstructed long-term planning, derailed government action, distracted cabinets, diverted budgets, weakened prime ministers, destabilised governments, enabled anonymous and often incompetent people to achieve positions of great influence and responsibility and blurred the distinctions between the executive and legislative branches of government. Perhaps most crucially, it has led talented, accomplished, moral and charismatic people to abandon the political arena to the mediocre, unimaginative and uncharismatic people who currently populate it.

There are 12 parties in the current Knesset, and over 140 have sat in its plenum in the past six decades, many of them one-hit wonders formed for bargaining purposes. To gain a majority a coalition must typically include four or five parties, spanning a wide ideological spectrum. Usually at least one is a religious or populist party that makes its support conditional on expensive budget handouts.

At its mildest, this means that ministers in the same cabinet publicly squabble all the time. More seriously, politicians are accountable to their party but not their voters. Parties that are brought in to make up the coalition numbers wield disproportionate clout, so extremists set the agenda. Pork-barrelling is rife. And important reforms are distorted by political haggling.

Another consequence of the coalition horse-trading: the Defence portfolio is held by a novice.

At its worst, the system threatens national security. The ability of a few tens of thousands of settlers to set Israeli policy in the occupied territories for four decades is the most glaring example. A more recent one was the 2006 Lebanon war. When Mr Olmert became prime minister as head of the centrist Kadima party, he brought Labour into the coalition by appointing its leader, Amir Peretz, a former trade-union boss, as defence minister. Mr Peretz would have preferred the finance portfolio, but Mr Olmert did not want a political rival holding the purse-strings, and defence was the only other job senior enough for the second-largest party. It was the first time the top two posts had been filled by people with no real experience in security matters. Four months later the war broke out. Its failures, found the Winograd commission that investigated it, were in large part due to the combination of an ill-prepared army and the politicians’ inexperience.

What to do?

Even those who favour change hotly debate what kind would work best. Besides a presidential or semi-presidential system, proposals include increasing the threshold to exclude all the small parties; expanding the Knesset, which is not big enough to be an effective check on the executive; and electing some or all of the Knesset members directly by constituency instead of by party list, to make them more answerable to their voters. A simple and useful change, says Mr Grinstein, would be for the biggest elected party always to be asked to form a government, rather than having to cobble together a coalition with a majority first. This would encourage parties to try to attract voters rather than other parties.

As it stands, the turkeys are in charge of the menu

…Still, it is politicians, not their voters, who will have to approve a change in the system. The risk is that whatever they agree on will continue to serve their own interests better than the country’s.