Israel’s Electoral System Called ‘a Cancer’

When Ariel Sharon assumes office in a few weeks, he will become Israel’s fifth prime minister in six years.

Politics aside, the high turnover amounts to a blistering indictment of Israeli democracy. Israel is saddled with a political system, critics say, that makes for weak governments and for prime ministers too hamstrung by partisan politics to be able to push far-reaching agendas.

Changes in the law nine years ago set up a hybrid system, part presidential, part parliamentary, in which the prime minister is elected directly and voters cast a separate ballot for a party for parliament.

“The electoral system is a cancer eating away at Israel’s political democracy,” said political scientist Gadi Wolfsfeld of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “It is a disaster and one of the greatest threats to Israel.”

Proponents of the system say it has made the prime minister accountable to a wider section of the public than just a party. In practice, however, the premier can be dumped at the whim of a parliament where he or she may have little support. It takes only a simple majority, 61 votes from among 120 members.

That means at best instability or at worst paralysis. Since the law was changed, no prime minister has been able to finish his term.

Such fragility is particularly worrisome in a country like this one, so embroiled in bloody regional conflicts. Israel, noted leading columnist Nahum Barnea, has become Italy with Bosnia-Herzegovina’s problems.

Now, in the wake of last week’s election, with predictions that Sharon too could be a short-timer, a movement to reform the system is gaining speed.

A law that would restore the old parliamentary system, with some modifications, is scheduled to go before a committee in the Knesset, or parliament, on Tuesday, in a last step before the full legislative body can vote on it. Having languished in the committee until now, the bill has wide support from both left and right.

The peculiarity of the Israeli system confronts Sharon immediately. He won election with a knockout margin of 62% of the vote, against 37% for his rival, incumbent Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Yet he faces a Knesset in which his Likud Party has only 19 seats. Despite a sweeping victory, he remains vulnerable.

To survive, Sharon has to form a coalition. He is diligently wooing Barak’s Labor Party, and in coalition talks Sunday, senior Likud and Labor officials sounded positive about merging forces.

Sharon, who has until March 29 to form a government, told a visiting delegation of American Jewish leaders that he had offered the defense and foreign ministries to Labor and that the ball was in Labor’s court. He added that he was optimistic that the two parties will join.

But if the courtship fails, Sharon will be forced to unite with half a dozen smaller parties. By nature, a coalition built of so many parts is unwieldy and unstable. A prime minister must constantly wonder whether members are loyal or ready to desert, because under the system, the prime minister serves at the pleasure of the Knesset despite having been elected by the people.

As talk of reform gains momentum, the debate is focusing on whether returning to the old system will really solve the problem.

The original move to change the electoral system began in 1987, when a group of Tel Aviv University law professors drafted a proposed constitution for Israel, which has not had one since its founding in 1948. The proposal included a bill of rights and provided for, among other changes, direct election of the prime minister and regional elections.

Then as now, the Israeli public was exasperated with its politicians, and that disdain peaked in 1990, when partisan maneuvering and back-room deal-cutting hit an all-time high. The big parties were bribing members of smaller parties to win their support; smaller parties were blackmailing larger parties to win a bit of power.

But the reform package, in the end, was watered down by a Knesset that jealously guarded its own power. The direct-election measure passed in 1992, but the Knesset added provisions--including that the prime minister must obtain Knesset approval for his or her government and that the parliament can oust a prime minister with a simple majority.

The new law applied for the first time in 1996, with the election of Benjamin Netanyahu. But the reform as implemented has not put an end to the practices it sought to eliminate and in fact has only perpetuated them.

Today, the Knesset is made up of 17 parties, some with only one or two seats. Russian immigrant voters, for example, are represented by three separate parties that exist more because of the egos of their leaders than owing to any differences in ideology. The government is routinely held hostage to the demands of tiny special-interest parties.

The electoral system makes Israel ungovernable, said Arye Carmon, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think tank and a leading proponent of ending the direct-election system.

“This is devastating to a democracy like Israel’s, which is vulnerable and in formation,” Carmon said. He advocates returning to the old system, but with mechanisms that would prevent abuses of the no-confidence motion, which has often been used here to topple governments.

Growing public apathy and disgust with the system, Carmon said, are turning people away not only from politics but from democracy. The most recent evidence came in last week’s election, when turnout was the lowest in Israeli history. As people are alienated from their political culture, the critics argue, they leave a vacuum accessible to dangerous extremists, demagogues and perhaps even dictators.

But Uriel Reichman, former dean of the Tel Aviv law faculty and patron of the direct-election system, said critics have idealized the old system and are forgetting just how flawed it was. He agrees that reform is needed but says a better approach would be to build on the current arrangement and improve it.

Today’s direct-election law “was partially due to people getting upset with the system that existed before,” he said. “To ignore that and simply go backward is a very simplistic approach.”

The greatest opposition to returning to the old system is coming from the smaller parties, which have benefited under direct-election voting. The ultra-Orthodox Shas Party, for example, has nearly tripled its portion of Knesset seats in the years since the current system was instituted. Shas is now the third-largest party, just two seats shy of Likud.

As the small parties proliferated, the blocs held by the two big parties, the hawkish Likud and the dovish Labor, shrank. Likud and Labor almost unanimously support returning to the old way.

“They think their days of grandeur will come back,” Reichman said. “But they are wrong.”

Another problem with Israeli democracy, critics say, is the ease with which a party can enter parliament. As it stands now, a party that receives just 1.5% of the vote wins a seat in the Knesset. That may give a voice to underrepresented minorities, but it also leads to sectarianism. The 1987 reform package included raising the threshold of votes needed.

“The problem is we go halfway,” said Asher Maoz, a Tel Aviv University expert in electoral law. “Either we are a presidential system or a parliamentary system, but to attempt to have both just doesn’t work. We get the worst of both systems.”