As Israel heads toward the October 27 election, shrinking major parties, deepening divisions, and the growing power of smaller factions threaten political stability, while the country’s diverse society makes electoral reform difficult
Elections present two tests in a democracy: electing a new government and uniting the people behind it.
Democracies in the 21st century consistently fail the second test. Election losers start plotting their revenge even before all the votes are counted, while the winners look for ways to retaliate against their opponents. Even the terminology has changed. Opponents used to be called “rivals.” Today they’re “enemies of the state.”
Israel’s chaotic electoral system, in which voters choose among dozens of parties in a single nationwide constituency, is part of the problem. But efforts to change it have failed, partly because of the unique makeup of Israeli society.
In a few days, Israelis will go to the polls to try to elect a new government. This time, they’re likely to fail both tests. Not only are the two main blocs demonizing each other, but they’re also resorting to racist insults and incendiary rhetoric. For example, pro-Netanyahu television commentator Yinon Magal likened Yashar party leader Gadi Eisenkot, the son of Moroccan Jewish immigrants, to a monkey and claimed that Ashkenazi elites were controlling him, while the opposing camp has run ads labeling its rivals “traitors.”
It’s unlikely, then, that the two sides would agree to work together in what’s known as a “national unity government.” The divisions over the critical issues facing Israel are too wide, too visceral:
- Dealing with the consequences of three years of war on Israel’s borders
- Investigating the failures that allowed the Hamas massacre of October 7, 2023, to happen
- Reversing the calamitous decline in Israel’s standing in the world
- Addressing military manpower shortages caused in part by sweeping draft exemptions for ultra-Orthodox men
- Confronting the economic and social consequences of huge subsidies to ultra-Orthodox communities, where workforce participation is relatively low
The divisive malady facing many democracies is usually called polarization. What we’re seeing in Israel today goes further. It’s “splinterization.”
In the last century—and that’s less than 30 short years ago—ruling parties would usually win at least 40 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament. A majority government needs 61 seats, so the leading party would bring in smaller ones to form a coalition.
That basic requirement hasn’t changed, but the political arithmetic has. According to recent polls, the two leading parties are each expected to win only about 20 to 23 seats.
This is a good place to point out that Israeli polls are often imprecise. Small shifts in voter support from week to week frequently fall within the margin of error, but that doesn’t stop the meaningless horse-race news coverage of who’s ahead and who’s behind.
Splinterization means that the party forming a government will probably command only a minority of the seats within its own coalition. The math is simple: If a coalition has 61 seats, its largest party needs 31 to hold a majority within that coalition. With only about 20 seats, it depends heavily on its smaller partners. Without that internal majority, and sometimes even with it, chaos ensues. Every little party can, and often does, hold the coalition hostage to force through its demands, no matter how extreme.
Over the space of a generation, the Israeli body politic has splintered so badly that no single party can control a government. Many voters who once supported one of the two main parties, Likud or Labor, have gravitated toward smaller parties, often with more hard-line positions.
Labor isn’t even on the ballot. The party of Israel’s founders that ruled the country unchallenged in its formative years is gone, doomed by poor policies, arrogance, and regional realities.
Likewise, the Likud of Menachem Begin, which took power for the first time in 1977 with 43 seats, is now polling at roughly half that number. Some of its former supporters have gravitated toward Jewish religious parties and other right-wing offshoots that favor harsher measures toward Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular.
Then there are the parties appealing to Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up about 20% of the population. Polls show these parties winning around 14 seats, but it’s not as if they occupy the political middle ground. Some Likud supporters call Arab Knesset members “terrorists,” and following the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel three years ago, even politically moderate parties opposed to Likud are reluctant to declare that they would seek support from an Arab party. That’s despite the fact that Israel’s Arab citizens were not responsible for the Hamas atrocities.
All this limits the post-election possibilities. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s most skillful politician, could cobble together a majority by signing up the Orthodox Jewish parties (the price of that would be extending the highly unpopular draft exemptions for tens of thousands of permanent yeshiva students) and enticing one of the moderate parties to join in exchange for promises of top cabinet positions and maybe even a shot at the premiership—a promise Netanyahu has made before and broken before.
On the other side, the moderates might try to form a minority government, counting on the Arab parties to abstain in crucial votes in parliament. Or they might try to lure some Likud members who have had enough of Netanyahu’s one-man party rule, stretching back, as it does, to 1996.
A recent poll found that 55% of Israelis would prefer a national unity government to another election if the October 27 vote produces no clear winner. But when the two sides call each other “traitors” and “enemies of the state,” they mean it. It’s not just politics.
So dealing with the issues listed above is likely to be beyond the scope of any government that emerges from this election. Most of the issues do not lend themselves to easy compromises, and few here are in the mood to compromise, anyway.
It’s a dark projection. Initiatives to reform the government and the voting system, from direct election of the prime minister to breaking up the nation into election districts instead of voting at-large, have all failed. They have failed because the current system, messy as it is, is the only one that fits.
Unlike most other Western-oriented nations, Israel is made up of multiple ethnicities, each with its own traditions and leaders. Add to that the natural feistiness and clannishness of the average Israeli, and you can understand why reforms like cutting down the number of parties would disenfranchise many voters, with regrettable results.
A keen observer of the political scene (my father) noted decades ago, “In a democracy, the form of government tends to reflect the society.”
And so, he concluded, “The people get what they deserve.”