This is Part One of a series of articles by Yoram about the Israeli elections coming up in about two weeks. We welcome any questions you may have about the parties, personalities and political process. We hope to get you a satisfactory answer.
After the extended excitement of the long fought American elections we now turn our attention to our own local, national democratic festival.
One advantage of the American system is that their system consists basically of only two parties. This contrasts with the system we use. Anyone bringing one hundred signatures to the proper government office can become a registered political party, and can have their name on the ballot and take their chances.
In our last elections, in 2006 there were (31) thirty one parties who qualified for that honor. After qualifying the next step is achieving enough votes to be represented in the Knesset (parliament). That requires receiving a minimum of 2% of the properly cast ballots. In that 2006 election 12 parties reached that threshold. In the ’06 elections the threshold was 62,740 votes
Last time the parties that did not qualify included; Power to the Poor 218 votes and Party for War against the Banks with 164 votes and the Greens with 47,634 votes. In other words the Greens lost the opportunity to enter the Knesset by 18,106 votes.
In years past there has been a Taxi Drivers party, and a party seeking justice for divorced fathers. This time we have a party dedicated to the youth, and the one man party of Dr. Ephriam Snea, for many years past a Labor party stalwart and cabinet member, whose campaign is focusing on the problem of crime in Israel and fighting against it
The party with the largest number of votes last time was Kadamah with 690,095. This year the Likud is expected to be the largest party in the Knesset and there by gains the right to propose its candidate, Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister. He will therefore be given first chance to gather a coalition of support from the other large parties to become prime minister, head of government..
Although I know only two democratic voting systems, the American and Israeli, from them I surmise that as democratic as democracies aspire to be, each system has its distortions, undemocratic flaw.
In America I believe its the Electoral College, in Israel its that all the votes for parties that fail to achieve the minimum 2% of electors support are thrown out. In the last election these discarded votes totaled 181797 votes which equals 7 1/3 seats. This discourages people from “throwing away” their franchise on parties whose goals they support. I would propose that each small party, or first time party designate one of the parties who sat in the past Knesset to receive its votes if it does not attract enough votes to qualify for representation.
There are always several parties representing the Jewish religious community as well as the Arab minority. Both of these blocks loose community votes to the larger parties, several of which include Arab and/or religious individuals in their knessette lists.
Within this construct I find it challenging to decide who to vote for.
This time around my true sympathies are between two parties who may indeed qualify for representation, just barely, but who will not be of much influence on the critical issues of these days and months. The Green party is made up of several of the most important and accomplished people in the Israeli environmental movement. Indeed individuals who were founders of the growing Israeli environmental awareness.
HaYihudim, (The Jews) is a party committed to changing the election system in Israel, something I believe is a critical necessity. Hopefully, they too will probably achieve the minimum number of votes but will be too small to have any real effect on the other critical issues.
One challenge of living here are the multiplicity of critical issues, all screaming for attention. Like everybody else we have the current economic crisis, unlike anyone else has been, and continues to be the existential and extremely complex relations with our untiring enemies. The critical questions of how to react to these threats and actual violence against our citizens. It is in relation to these issues that I feel I must cast my vote. The crisis are always overwhelming and are NOW!
Part of our tragedy is that there is never the luxury of long range contemplation and planning. This year sadly, is no exception.
