Israeli Elections
The BBC reports that Prime Minister Netanyahu calls early poll.
Bibi can’t get a budget passed because his coalition includes the parties of the whacko fundamentalists who are exempt from military service and live on government welfare. The new budget needed to cut some benefits and the parasites won’t agree to them.
People don’t understand much about the government structure in Israel, so here’s some information.
People don’t get to vote for members of the Knesset, they only get to vote for parties. The parties create their individual lists of people that will fill the seats, but there are no guarantees. The leaders of the parties are selected by party members, so the general public doesn’t get to vote for the Prime Minister.
There are 120 seats in the Knesset, the parliament of Israel. The parties are given the number of seats that is equivalent to the percentage of the total vote they received in the election, i.e. if a party receive 10% of the total vote they received 12 seats in the Knesset, so the top 12 people on their list have a job.
In the last election the Likud Party received about 23% of the vote, so they have 27 seats in the Knesset. Since you need 61 seats to have a viable government, Netanyahu had to form a coalition with 5 other parties.
Netanyahu and his party don’t even represent a quarter of the electorate of Israel. If they can’t convince Israelis to support them, what on earth is the US doing backing every hare-brained scheme they come up with?
I would note, that US Presidential candidates should keep in mind that after the Israeli election in December, Netanyahu may not be the prime minister, so slavishly looking for his approval is not a great idea.
2 comments
Someone at my office suggested proportional voting as a solution to the problem of 3rd parties being locked out of office by the tyranny of basic arithmetic in a 1st past the gate system (i.e., you need 50%+1 votes to be elected, thus the system will naturally settle down to two parties over time as smaller parties coalesce to guarantee themselves that 50%+1 votes). I merely smiled and said “Israel has that, and their politics are just as dysfunctional as ours.”
He then pointed out that yes, but at least in Israel the smaller parties have a voice. I then pointed out that no, in Israel the smaller parties were wagging the dog, and that it empowered smaller extremist parties far beyond their numbers because they could threaten to break the coalition by walking out. The end result is not better politics by any means. We have enough extremists in government already (you already mentioned three such induhviduals here), we don’t need to give them more power to go with their stupidity, the way the Israeli system has worked in practice.
Whether it’s the Tea-partiers or the Blue Dogs, the effects are the same in the US system, but in a proportional system you have hard numbers on how many voters are actually represented by those views, and you don’t have the current problem of voting for someone who shares none of your values because of the party label he chooses to wear.
Politics is already too ‘tribal’, we might as well have some truth in labeling.
I actually prefer the instant run-off system where you rank candidates for an office and if no one wins a majority of the votes, the second preference kicks in. We have people in Congress who only represent 40% of those who voted in their election. They do that in Australia.