Ordinary Nothing

The elections for the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) took place last week.

Basically the Knesset has 120 seats. People vote for parties, and the seats are divided according to the relative amount of votes each party received (as long as a party passed a certain minimum).

The Prime Minister is then selected by the president as the party leader with the best chance of managing to arrange a coalition of parties big enough to form a government (i.e. a majority). And the parties who enter the coalition then divide the ministers’ positions in the government between them.

Well, roughly.

The system does encourage quite a few small parties, since minor groups have a chance of entering the Knesset, and even a decent chance of entering the government. Sometimes it even gives them too much power, since if the largest party can’t get enough support to form a government, another party leader may get the chance to be PM and from the government instead. This gives the small parties quite a lot of leverage.

And can sometimes have amusing results. In this election, for example, the biggest surprise was the pensioner’s party. They did have a chance to enter the Knesset, since there are a lot of old pensioners out there who understandably think about their own needs more than about some grand political schemes. But nobody expected them to do more than barely pass, if at all. And apparently lots of people who didn’t like anyone else decided to vote for them as a default, since it appeared harmless enough. Resulting in them getting 7 seats. And almost certainly entering the government.

One running gag about it is the surprise that the people at the 6th and 7th positions didn’t have a heart attack when they heard they’re in. Obviously none of them really expected to. Another cheap shot, but amusing, about them being old was a skit about a prominent politician saying he moved to their party to the 20th position. When asked why does he like it, given that they only got 7 seats, he replied that it’s only a matter of a few months until he’s in.

Another interesting results was the Avoda party, who received 19-20 seats (they’re still finishing with the final tally, and squabbling over everything). This makes them the second largest party, after Kadima with 29-30 seats.

The feelings are that they would have gotten a lot more votes if it weren’t for their party leader, Amir Peretz, whose views, at least some of them, are not particularly popular even among the party’s loyal voters. I myself know a few die-hard Avoda voters who didn’t vote for them this year because of him. And given the difference in votes between them and Kadima, having someone else might have been enough to make them the largest party, and having the first shot at building the government.

The Likud party, which together with the Avoda has been one of the two largest parties for a long long time, has suffered a lot, dropping to 12 seats. Finger pointing of course commenced immediately, with most of the fire directed towards the party leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Partially justified, since a lot of people don’t like him personally either.

Though mostly what hurt them was Kadima, which was basically started by Ariel Sharon, the Likud party leader until not so long ago, who retired, taking a lot of the people, and the seats, with him.

Sharon also appeared prominently in Kadima’s campaign TV ads. Which is amusing given that he’s lying unconscious in a hospital, will take no active part in the party, and doesn’t have much to do with its current form except for vague statements they make about them being committed to continuing his legacy, whatever that may be.

All in all, lots of political fun. As always.

And a serious dearth of parties, and politicians, worth voting for. That’s usually the case, in that I always feel like instead of voting for the best party I have to settle on voting for the least of all evils. This year, however, deciding who is the least bad, well, wasn’t easy at all. I nearly decided to give up and skip the vote.

The problem being that, unlike few-parties methods like the American, we do have a plethora of small bizarre parties. This means that a missing vote is, relatively, a vote for the small parties. And I like most of them a lot less than my few least-bad candidates.

Oh, well. This election is over. Next one in four more years. Unless, as happened a lot lately, something will happen to force an earlier election.

April 4th, 2006 at 16:03 EET | Categories: Current Affairs, Politics | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.