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Why Netanyahu Will Reign After Yet Another Election
“There will not be a fifth election.” This was the adamant claim of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu during a recent interview with Channel 13’s Ayala Hasson.
Netanyahu asserted that this time around, the elections would result in a definitive victory and a stable coalition.
The longtime premier said the confidence was based on internal polls conducted by his own Likud party. According to a senior Likud official, the party’s polls ask respondents how sure they are that they will vote at all and how resolute they are about backing their party of choice. The surveys found that Netanyahu’s supporters are firm. In contrast, claimed Netanyahu, those aligned with his rivals’ parties, Naftali Bennett’s Yamina and New Hope headed by former confidant Gideon Saar, were much less certain about their vote.
Yes, uncertainty has been the name of the game in Israeli politics, which has seen the most volatile two years in its history, pandemic chaos notwithstanding.
The Prime Minister’s remarks were almost certainly in response to comments made by his political rival Benny Gantz who had told an interviewer two days earlier that the risk of yet another election was high. It is well within Netanyahu’s interests to quell those fears. The prospect of the upcoming March 23rd vote being for naught could sap his supporters’ enthusiasm and keep them home on election day.
News outlets have been speaking for months about the so-called “election fatigue” being experienced by the general population.
Israel’s Basic Law requires elections to take place every four years – on a Tuesday in the Hebrew month of Cheshvan to be precise. But this orderly procedure has not been the way things actually play out. The instability of government coalitions has led to much more frequent voting. Three months ago, the Jerusalem-based Israel Democracy Institute published a report showing how Israel conducts far more elections than other Western democracies, averaging one round every 2.3 years, compared to other countries with a gap of three or more between polls.
March 23 will mark election number four in a two-year period. For many, the repetitive nature of the stalemate is getting a bit ridiculous. One online commentator recently quipped: “Do I have to bring my ID with me to vote next week, or will they remember me from last time?”
But for all the talk of being worn out from elections, it seems most Israelis are still game.
In a recent poll by media outlet Israel Hayom, a whopping sixty-two percent of those polled stated they were definitely planning to vote. Another twenty percent said there was a high likelihood they would participate. With three-fifths of voter turnout, it is not lack of participation that will influence the outcome. In fact, just the opposite seems to be the case.
Fourth –and Final?
Why Netanyahu Will Reign After Yet Another Election
BY SHAMMAI SISKIND
Mapping the Field
Unique to this round of elections is the ever-mounting risk of a peculiar phenomenon that can have a drastic impact on who will be occupying the next Knesset. This electoral effect, known as vote splitting, comes about when the distribution of votes among multiple similar candidates reduces the chance of winning for any of the similar candidates and increases the probability of victory for those candidates’ opposition.
This type of political strategizing tends to be more common to a “winner-takes-all” type election, namely one in which the ticket with the most votes wins. In such an arrangement, the disbursement of total votes is essentially irrelevant. All that a given candidate is concerned with is grabbing more votes
than all the other candidates. What this means practically is that dividing an electorate can be absolutely deadly to a political movement.
Students of U.S. governmental history can readily recall the catastrophe that befell the Republican party in the 1912 presidential election. The incumbent Howard Taft, who had been “handpicked” by his immensely popular predecessor Teddy Roosevelt, faced progressive Woodrow Wilson in the race to the White House. An acrimonious falling-out between Roosevelt and his longtime friend Taft two years earlier ended up spurring Roosevelt to run as a third party candidate. The disunity among Republican voters resulted in a landslide victory for Wilson, with one of the largest margins in history. But it wasn’t so much that Wilson won than the Republican side lost. Only 41 percent of total votes went to Wilson, while 27 percent and 23 percent went to Taft and Roosevelt, respectively. Combined, Taft’s and Roosevelt’s votes would have easily given the Republicans both the popular vote and the Electoral College.
Traditionally, Israeli politics has not been concerned with the problem of vote splitting. Sure, the disbursement of votes can and does have an important effect on coalition bargaining. But the idea that voter capital would go to waste completely had not been so central to the equation. Israel’s parliamentary system is designed to include even the most marginalized political voices.
This time around, however, is different.
In the last several months, a wave of new factions has sprung up from across Israel’s political spectrum, particularly those seeking a piece of the center-left base. This occurrence has been triggered by several factors, most prominent among them the eruption of new social crises created by the pandemic and related government restrictions, as well as the abject failure of the last center-left project, the Blue and White conglomerate headed by Benny Gantz.
These initiatives, often backed by talented and committed individuals, have, in an ironic way, the potential to completely undermine their own agendas.
The single biggest factor in the coming election may very well be the fact that the field is spread as thin as it is. Lacking a unified political force, the anti-Netanyahu bloc simply may not be able to put enough scattered seats into the Knesset. In this sense, Netanyahu’s unwavering, iron-support will serve him well. The center-left agenda will likely fail, not due to lack of votes but because of a lack of electoral cohesion.
Divide and Conquer
To get a picture of how this might play out, let’s take a look at the math.
Out of the country’s population of 9.14 million, 5.9 million Israelis (about 64%) are currently eligible to vote, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. This has important implications for smaller parties clamoring to get into the Knesset. High voter turnout also makes the numerical demands of Israel’s 3.25 percent threshold for entry into the Knesset go up. What this means – assuming polls and stats are somewhat accurate – is that any party looking to scrape by on March 23 needs to convince around 156,000 Israelis to vote for them.
Smaller parties relying on their traditional base will be hardest hit by this fact as they tend to rely on their tiny but committed constituencies for their support. These bases don’t necessarily grow in number every time the total voter turnout increases. The Arab coalition party, for instance, Ra’am (sometimes referred to as the United Arab List), has been teetering on the threshold edge for weeks with no clear indication it will pass the mark.
In some cases, it is the similarity of platforms that will split voters into below-threshold camps. Early polls predicted the demise of the Labor party, which was but a few decades ago by far the most powerful party in Israel. Labor’s lost support translated into more projected votes for the progressive Meretz, as former Labor voters went looking for a more promising left-wing ticket. Meretz was but a few weeks ago projected by multiple polls an average of five seats. But the situation changed after left-wing superstar Merav Michaeli was elected Labor leader. With her signature flare and often aggressive organization tactics, she has been able to revive the party, now projected to win six or seven mandates, but that clearly came at Meretz’s expense, as the party has begun faltering in the polls.
Both Labor and Meretz now face the unprecedented situation of vying for the same votes. It is not inconceivable that, once the dust settles, Israeli politics will be unable to accommodate two parties with near-identical platforms and both parties will fall by the wayside.
In other instances, voters with niche interests will be whittled off their traditional groups. While factionalism has been a staple of Israeli politics for years, what has emerged in Israel over the more recent period is something even more extreme. Instead of single issue voters, Israel has seen a plethora of single issue parties, tickets on which their entire political sales pitch revolves around a myopic sliver of policy concerns.
Take the Economic Party (Calcalit), the pop-up group founded by professor Yaron Zlicha back in December. Economist Zlicha made a reputation for himself as the Accountant General of the Ministry of Finance in the early 2000s during Netanyahu’s tenure as Finance Minister. The sweeping reforms he enacted during that period are still perceived by the public as the cause for much of Israel’s economic and fiscal maturation. With the country in the throes of COVID lockdown and economic collapse, the time is perfect for Zlicha to step in. He quite easily advertised himself as the one to manage Israel’s economic recovery. Several groups of independent workers – the societal segment hit hardest by COVID restrictions – held up Zlicha as their savior. But a mere three months following its founding, polls indicate the Economic Party has lost the majority of its support and will likely not make it into power. Adding insult to injury, a key member of the party’s lineup, one of Zlicha’s prominent fellow academics Dr. Yoram Yuval, recently announced his withdrawal from the party.
A similar storyline befell other small factions that sprang up in the last several months, such as Yisraelim, headed by Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai, and Rapeh, founded by the controversial Dr. Aryeh Avni.
The misguided “single issue” branding is not only an impetus for the forma-
tion of new parties. It has also become a survival tactic for once stable factions to retain the image of electoral value before going under completely. This is the sad tale of the Blue and White party and its leader, former IDF chief Benny Gantz. In the last election, Gantz was a strong contender for the premiership and a real threat to the hegemony of Netanyahu and Likud. After breaking his campaign promise to not sit in a government with Netanyahu, Gantz began his slow and painful decline, losing political allies and hemorrhaging supporters. For a while now, polls have shown Blue and White barely avoiding the electoral cliff. This has led to numerous public calls from supporters (even some former colleagues) for Gantz to gracefully bow out.
Gantz, however, as late as last week insists he still has a place at the policymaking table. Why is this? Well, as Gantz put it in a recent interview, he is the “only one” who is capable of stopping Netanyahu from pushing an immunity law, which would cancel corruption charges the prime minister is currently facing. This is indeed a sorrowful picture. The man who was neck-and-neck with Netanyahu less than a year ago must now cling to the prevention of a single law as his only politically redeeming quality.
With all the above factors in mind, the following scenario on March 23 is well within the realm of possibility:
Most of the smaller parties refuse to pull out of the race. Four of them – Meretz, Labor, Blue and White, and the Economic party – each receive between three to two percent of the vote. Since none of these tickets would pass the threshold, well over half a million votes could go to waste, translating into as many as 14 lost seats for the center-left. This is obviously an extreme case. But even if something remotely similar occurred, it could knock out a significant portion of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, currently estimated to garner 58 seats, already three seats shy of the needed majority.
So yes, Netanyahu is right. It is his stable base that has been and continues to be his greatest asset. Perhaps in no other election has it been so important. As many have already begun predicting, the fragmented Israeli center-left will likely lead to a decisive routing of the anti-Netanyahu camp, leaving the longest serving prime minister in the country’s history to divide the spoils amongst both his allies and those merely willing to tolerate him.
vacatIon
