Back to the old order

The era during which autocratic parties laid siege to Likud and Labor is drawing to a close.

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
Netanyahu and Herzog (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST,REUTERS)
Netanyahu and Herzog
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST,REUTERS)
THE SPLIT infinitive is bad, said the writer in Winston Churchill before the politician in him qualified, splitting parties is worse.
The number of Israeli politicians who care for the split infinitive is even lower than the number of those who have heard of it, but they would all agree that splitting parties, an old habit of theirs, will become rare in the coming years as new surgery rearranges the guts of Israeli politics.
Three such surgeries are currently at play.
One, which may produce this election’s main sensations, is last year’s lifting of the electoral threshold from 2 percent to 3.25 percent of the electorate. Another change is a proposed law that would automatically assign the task of building a coalition to the largest party’s leader. Underpinning these mechanics is the decline of the autocratic party and the end of its 20-year siege on the duo that once dominated Israeli politics – Likud and Labor.
Israeli voters never gave any single party a parliamentary majority. The closest anyone ever got to such a feat was Golda Meir in 1969, when her alignment of center-left parties won 56 of the Knesset’s 120 seats.
Even so, until two decades ago, the ruling party won an average of 45 seats, while the two largest parties averaged a combined 73 seats.
All this changed in 1996 when the victorious Likud won a mere 32 Knesset seats as opposed to the 44 won by the previous election’s victor, Labor. Since then, the victors have averaged 30 seats and the two largest parties a combined 53 seats. Three prime ministers – Ehud Barak in 1999, Ehud Olmert in 2006 and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2009 – led factions that represented less than a quarter of the legislature.
The cause of this electoral collapse was the short-lived election reform of 1996, which let voters vote separately for a party and for the prime minister. That made many abandon the big parties without feeling they did so, since they still voted for the big party’s prime-ministerial candidate.
Though that reform was abolished in 2001, the big parties had lost their historic grip on the electorate’s critical mass.
Meanwhile, with Labor and Likud failing to produce leaders as electrifying as David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, charisma traveled elsewhere. That is how Shas emerged in 1984 immediately after Begin’s departure.
Yet Shas not only shifted charisma to the political periphery, it castrated the institution of the political party as Israel had known it. Answering to a supreme leader who was not even a lawmaker, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas transplanted an undemocratic fixture into the heart of Israeli democracy.
Israeli parties had traditionally used broad forums where major issues were debated and candidacies were screened by hundreds and even thousands of party members, whether through primary elections or other participatory mechanisms.
Shas never used such methods, answering instead to one sage who handpicked the party’s each and every lawmaker; personally assigned all its ministers, and decided its policies. So unabashed was that party about its non-democracy that it never even bothered offering its voters a way to become party members.
Having been a success, Shas’s personalized party was soon emulated by others.
First came former chief of staff Lt.-Gen. (res.) Rafael Eitan, who used it while attracting anti-religious hawks, a constituency later courted by Avigdor Liberman, who used Shas’s formula while wooing the Russian-speaking electorate, and then came Yair Lapid, who used it while courting the middle class. Most recently, it was adopted by former communications minister Moshe Kahlon, who is eyeing the middle and working classes.
The common denominator among these secular parties is that, unlike Labor, Likud, Bayit Yehudi and Meretz, they hold no primary elections and, like Shas, they center around one leader who handpicks Knesset candidates, appoints ministers and formulates policy without reporting to a broad party-members’ forum, or seeking its approval.
Though the rise of the autocratic party began in 1984, a decade and a half before the big parties’ decline began, the two processes fed each other. The great successes of Yosef and Liberman in 1999 and 2009, when their parties won 17 and 15 seats, respectively, came at the expense of the Likud, while Lapid’s success in 2013, when his party won 19 seats, came thanks to an electorate whose social origins were often in Labor.
The personalized party and its brainchild – autocracy – were not confined to one set of parties. They were a zeitgeist.
What began in 1992 when Yitzhak Rabin placed his name on Labor’s ballot, a previously unthinkable self-celebration that has since been emulated even by super-socialist Shelly Yachimovich, was later followed by much more meaningful political solos.
For instance, when he succeeded Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert campaigned for a retreat from the West Bank on behalf of the newly established Kadima without consulting it first; Ehud Barak held no debate in Labor before taking it into Netanyahu’s government; Naftali Bennett consulted no one before trying to insert a secular soccer star into his Orthodox party’s Knesset list; and Labor’s current candidate for finance minister, Manuel Trajtenberg, consulted no party forum before presenting a surprisingly centrist economic platform.
The days when such habits are kicked and parties return to be the policy councils they once were may still be distant. However, the personalized parties are in for a beating, after which they will not return to what they have been for more than a generation.
Fittingly, the autocratic party’s decline began in the same party that invented it – Shas.
Having split almost immediately after its founder’s death in 2013, Shas is now expected to shrink and decay. The dynamics in that party, whose current and previous leaders are now sparring publicly, unveil the other side of autocratic parties, which is that when their founders go they take with them the glue that held their creations together.
By contrast, when Ben-Gurion left Labor in 1965, it survived his departure and, in fact, defeated him when he founded a breakaway party, thus proving it represented not a man, but an idea, as well as a broad party membership and efficient institutions.
The same happened in Likud, which survived Begin’s abrupt departure intact.
Polls indicate that Shas will lose at least a third of its 11 seats and, as such, be dwarfed by the modern-Orthodox Bayit Yehudi, and even emerge smaller than ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism for the first time ever.
Meanwhile, Shas’s amputated limb, the Yahad Party, is teetering on the brink of the newly raised electoral threshold, which it hopes to cross by mixing former Shas voters with right-wingers, including extremists, who dislike what they see as Bayit Yehudi’s compromised religiosity.
Whatever this particular party’s fortunes, the new threshold is likely to trip at least some of Israeli autocracy’s heroes and, thus, accelerate their decline.
The new threshold means that to enter the Knesset a party must effectively win at least four seats. Legislated last year, it was the fourth time the threshold was raised since 1951 when it was lifted from the original 0.8 percent to 1 percent of the electorate.
Though still lower than, for instance, Sweden, Norway, Austria and Italy’s 4 percent, the new threshold may emerge as one of the upcoming election’s major heroes.
One surprising result has already been registered when the Knesset’s three Arab factions created a federated ballot, despite their 11 lawmakers ranging from communists to Islamists. This improbable configuration will likely emerge larger than the sum of its parts.
Yet, the lifted threshold’s impact may prove a destroyer more than a builder because it threatens with extinction two of Israeli politics’ most spicy ingredients: Yisrael Beytenu on the right and Meretz on the left.
Liberman is now openly treated as a strategic target by the Likud, which two years ago ran with the foreign minister on a joint ticket, but now sees in his potential demise an opportunity to repatriate a chunk of its historic electorate. The result is open war, particularly since Liberman said he wants the defense portfolio, a demand he peppered with ad-hominem attacks on the incumbent, Likud’s Moshe Ya’alon.
Labor is not attacking Meretz frontally, but it doesn’t have to since the very announcement of its alliance with former justice minister Tzipi Livni, and her Hatnua party, immediately damaged Meretz, which descended in the polls from its current seven seats to five.
Chances are high that at least one party with a sizable following – Meretz, Yisrael Beytenu or Yahad – will fail to cross the threshold. The consequent loss of some three seats’ worth of votes will impact the entire system because unelected parties’ votes are not counted, meaning that the combined votes of the bloc to which they belong shrink.
The age of autocratic parties is not over, and the large parties’ renaissance has yet to arrive.
The two leading parties in the approaching election are forecast to garner a combined 50-plus mandates, not much more than the previous election’s 50. However, the previous election’s runner-up was Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which won 19 seats as opposed to Likud’s 31. Now it is Labor, which is frontrunner with Likud.
Labor was the second-largest party in 2006, before falling in 2009 to fourth place and then climbing in 2013 to third place.
Likud lost its place among the leading pair once, in 2006, when it tied third with Shas.
Now the historic pair’s return as the political system’s nucleus seems a foregone conclusion.
Meanwhile, the personalized parties are all on the decline, including Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which is forecast to lose up to half its electorate. Most tellingly, Kahlon is expected to fail in his quest to repeat Lapid’s achievement. Currently forecast to win hardly 10 seats, mainly at the expense of Lapid and Likud, Kahlon will likely command barely half as many seats as the second-largest faction, and that goes for all candidates seeking to be the next Knesset’s third-largest party.
The public, in short, is growing tired of sages like Yosef, strongmen like Liberman, celebrities like Lapid, and knights in shining armor like Kahlon.
The question, therefore, is what Likud and Labor will make of their restored dominance.
Logic suggests they will jointly promote legislation to automatically entrust the largest party’s leader with forming a coalition. Such reform would exploit the apparent fatigue with personalized parties and give voters a further incentive to vote for the large parties. Netanyahu has already said he will promote such reform, and Labor will surely join in.
Then again, to pass such legislation Labor and Likud will need to command a combined 61 lawmakers, or some 20 percent more than their forecasted following, since the other parties will want to preserve the leverage they gathered while the big parties split and shrank.
This is why Liberman decried a deal he claims Labor and Likud have already struck to form the next government jointly.
Whatever the accuracy of that report, one thing is clear. After a two-decade absence, the odd couple that once dominated Israeli politics is planning its return.