Israel in Need of Political Reform to Make Stable Government Possible, Experts Say
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MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Israel needs to reform its parliamentary system to have a stable government and improve the country's party politics, experts told Sputnik in the wake of the collapse of the eight-party coalition led by current Prime Minister Yair Lapid and his predecessor Naftali Bennett.
Last week, Israel's parliament voted to dissolve itself after the ruling Bloc of Change coalition had lost its paper-thin majority. Lapid, who served as the foreign minister in Bennett's cabinet and is also the leader of the largest opposition party Yesh Atid, assumed the office of prime minister until the next parliamentary elections scheduled for November. This will be the country's fifth snap vote in under four years.
The previous one took place in March 2021 after the parliament had dissolved itself due to the failure to adopt a state budget by the deadline. It ended with Lapid forming a coalition agreement with Bennett, who leads the right-wing Yamina political alliance, entailing a rotational two-year premiership.
Unique Coalition
The coalition created by Bennett and Lapid was the most diverse in Israel's history, consisting of parties that run the gamut from right to left, religious to secular, and even included an Arab party, the United Arab List (also known as Ra'am). Other coalition members included Yesh Atid, Yamina, Blue and White, Yisrael Beiteinu, New Hope, Labor and Meretz.
The coalition's diversity is explained by the shared desire to prevent Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud party and a former prime minister, from once again taking power. However, the variety of political forces presented in the coalition also made it hard to sustain.
"The effort and the energy that were invested in maintaining the coalition government throughout this year actually exhausted the government and the people at the top, and they couldn’t really deal with certain issues that could have given them credit were they successful in surviving until the next elections," Tamar Hermann, a professor of political science at the Open University of Israel and academic director of the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute, said.
According to Itzhak Galnoor, a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and emeritus Herbert Samuel professor of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Bennett-Lapid government should have invested much more effort in keeping the alliance together, which they failed to do.
"It was an attempt to save Israeli democracy, prevent corruption, show that a government can function without all those tricks and things that the Netanyahu government was notable for doing for many years. In this way, I mean the second part, they actually did succeed for a while. So, the main failure, as I said, was the problem of maintaining some politicians within the parties who knew exactly what they were getting into. It wasn’t just that the whole experiment was a failure, it was more of a personal thing," Galnoor said.
The expert also suggested that if the Arab political alliance Joint List, which was not part of the ruling coalition, had given its support to the government and overcome the personal animosity between them and the United Arab List then the coalition would have survived.
"So, it is difficult to say more than we have now personification of politics, which makes it very difficult to have a coalition and it does not matter even if we may have ten elections," Galnoor surmised.
Meanwhile, Liron Lavi, a lecturer and research fellow at the UCLA Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, drew attention to the changes in the Israeli political spectrum.
"'Right' and 'Left' are much less about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict- the main issue that has defined Israeli politics since 1967. Instead, the political axis in Israel is being re-shaped around issues of the state's Jewish identity and democracy," she stated, adding that "in light of this change, and until the political axis will be redefined and parties will realign themselves along it, we are expected to see more political instability in Israel in the near future."
Time for Change
The series of snap elections has revealed the issues with Israel's current electoral system, in which parliamentary seats are proportionally divided between parties and a ruling coalition must secure 61 seats in order to form a government. However, creation of a stable political coalition out of sprawling factions has become a daunting task. At the same time, parties are currently the least trusted political organizations in Israel, with people often having little idea what is the real difference between them, according to Hermann.
"Many parties do not even have platforms, so people vote by identification based on, as I said, the level of religiosity and past experience," Hermann explained. "The parties are, in a way, obsolete, but we don’t have any alternative channel for choosing the candidates for the national elections, so if the electoral system is changed, probably the parties will have to adapt and maybe become more relevant."
Galnoor, for his part, underscored the need to make sure the country has a stable government and ruling coalition, noting that the Israeli Democracy Institute suggested the following changes to the country's parliamentary system: making the head of the biggest party after the election the prime minister by default so they could form a governing coalition as well as introducing mixed elections, with some lawmakers representing geographic constituencies instead of being voted on via party lists.
"You have, let’s say, a member of the Knesset [who] represents the Negev, the south, he would have to represent all the people in the south. It would be Jewish and Arab and it would be Orthodox and non-Orthodox, so you would have a representative, a member of the Knesset, that cuts across the differences in society," the expert outlined the idea.
Shmuel Sandler, the professor emeritus of political science at Bar-Ilan University and a senior research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies also called for electoral reform and hoped that a coalition without Netanyahu might implement it.
"He would try to go for a reform in which the head of the largest party is also elected as PM. But this does not assure stability," Sandler noted.
