Bernard Lewis: Israel's Election System Is No Good
[Mr. Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, is the author of "From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East" (Oxford University Press, 2004).]
On Feb. 10, Israel elected a new Knesset (or parliament) -- the 18th since the establishment of the state in May 1948. Like its predecessors, it consists of a hodgepodge of 12 different parties. The two largest parties, Kadima and Likud, won 23% and 21% of the vote, giving them 28 and 27 seats respectively -- a long way short of a majority. For seven weeks, neither was able to create a viable coalition to take over the government of the country. At last, a coalition government led by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged.
In a sense, the creation of any sort of working democracy in Israel is a remarkable achievement. Since its creation, the country has been engaged in a life-and-death struggle with relentless enemies. It exists in a region where democracy hasn't flourished, and most of its citizens originate in countries with little or no experience of democratic government. Despite all of this, there has been no attempt at a military takeover or any kind of coup d'état -- not even a constitutional crisis.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that electoral reform of some kind is imperative if Israeli democracy is to survive. The latest election reveals in an acute form the gaping inadequacies and, worse still, the looming dangers of the existing electoral process and the resulting political structure: indecisive, splintered and at times corrupt.
Electoral reform has been discussed before and was even attempted in 1992 when the Knesset introduced a new law providing for the direct election of the prime minister. I remarked at the time, in the course of a lecture in Jerusalem, that Israel already had the worst electoral system in the Free World and had succeeded, with true Jewish ingenuity, in doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: finding a way to make it even worse. My audience reacted with thunderous applause. That pseudo-reform was abandoned in March 2001; the need to establish a workable electoral system able to function effectively remains.
The present system is usually described as "nationwide proportional representation." That is to say, the whole country is a single constituency, in which parties -- not individuals -- compete. Each party has its own list of members, and each has its own way of assembling and arranging that list. The presidency, like the British monarchy on which it is apparently modeled, is primarily symbolic. The head of government is the prime minister; he and his cabinet are all members of the Knesset, where they must command a majority of votes in order to govern or even survive. The threshold for admission to the Knesset -- which consists of 120 members -- is just 2% of the total vote. The result is that parliamentary representation, and with it a measure of political influence, at times even of control, is given to various special interest groups, which in a normal constituency system would never succeed in electing a single member....
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On Feb. 10, Israel elected a new Knesset (or parliament) -- the 18th since the establishment of the state in May 1948. Like its predecessors, it consists of a hodgepodge of 12 different parties. The two largest parties, Kadima and Likud, won 23% and 21% of the vote, giving them 28 and 27 seats respectively -- a long way short of a majority. For seven weeks, neither was able to create a viable coalition to take over the government of the country. At last, a coalition government led by Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu has emerged.
In a sense, the creation of any sort of working democracy in Israel is a remarkable achievement. Since its creation, the country has been engaged in a life-and-death struggle with relentless enemies. It exists in a region where democracy hasn't flourished, and most of its citizens originate in countries with little or no experience of democratic government. Despite all of this, there has been no attempt at a military takeover or any kind of coup d'état -- not even a constitutional crisis.
But it is becoming increasingly clear that electoral reform of some kind is imperative if Israeli democracy is to survive. The latest election reveals in an acute form the gaping inadequacies and, worse still, the looming dangers of the existing electoral process and the resulting political structure: indecisive, splintered and at times corrupt.
Electoral reform has been discussed before and was even attempted in 1992 when the Knesset introduced a new law providing for the direct election of the prime minister. I remarked at the time, in the course of a lecture in Jerusalem, that Israel already had the worst electoral system in the Free World and had succeeded, with true Jewish ingenuity, in doing something I wouldn't have thought possible: finding a way to make it even worse. My audience reacted with thunderous applause. That pseudo-reform was abandoned in March 2001; the need to establish a workable electoral system able to function effectively remains.
The present system is usually described as "nationwide proportional representation." That is to say, the whole country is a single constituency, in which parties -- not individuals -- compete. Each party has its own list of members, and each has its own way of assembling and arranging that list. The presidency, like the British monarchy on which it is apparently modeled, is primarily symbolic. The head of government is the prime minister; he and his cabinet are all members of the Knesset, where they must command a majority of votes in order to govern or even survive. The threshold for admission to the Knesset -- which consists of 120 members -- is just 2% of the total vote. The result is that parliamentary representation, and with it a measure of political influence, at times even of control, is given to various special interest groups, which in a normal constituency system would never succeed in electing a single member....