Some parties have long had the matter on their agenda, and various think tanks and scholars have drafted detailed proposals over the years of how to improve the Israeli system.
Some common recommendations propose raising the electoral threshold – the minimum percentage a party must get today to gain a foothold in the Knesset is 3.25% – or automatically awarding the leader of the largest elected party the task of forming the new government.
Others have suggested even broader changes, such as electing MKs as representatives of voting districts, or for a two-step ballot in which voters for a party will also choose the members of that party’s list on Election Day.
But quite a few of the recent suggestions have had a very narrow focus. Like so much else in Israeli politics, they’re all about Bibi.
Across the political spectrum, suggestions have been floated to either oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or keep him in office.
Netanyahu has been prime minister for 14 years, 12 of them consecutive, so several parties have proposed term limits for the premiership. Labor leader Merav Michaeli is one who has championed this idea for years.
Another change Netanyahu’s opponents have been pushing is to prohibit someone who is under indictment to form a government. Currently, Israeli law permits a prime minister to remain in office even after being charged with a crime and until a final verdict on appeal is handed down.
Either of those proposals would effectively boot Netanyahu from office, and shuffle the political deck, freeing Shas and UTJ from their obligations to him and allowing the formation of a diverse political coalition, or allowing right-wing politicians who refuse to sit with Netanyahu, such as New Hope’s Gideon Sa’ar and Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman, to be part of a coalition with Likud again.
On the flip side, there are proposals to enact laws to keep Netanyahu in office. One idea that has been floated by Netanyahu supporters sporadically in recent years is to pass the “French law,” which bans putting a sitting prime minister on trial. Then, the parties who say they won’t sit with a prime minister under indictment will no longer have an excuse to stay out of a Netanyahu-led government.
Shas leader Aryeh Deri has been pushing a return to direct elections for prime minister. Netanyahu is not only the head of the largest party, he consistently comes out on top in public opinion polls of who is most suited to be prime minister, and would be likely to win. Then, Netanyahu would automatically be tasked with forming a government, and, the theory goes, some of the parties that were reticent to join him would respect the will of the public and return to the fold.
However, it must be remembered that Israel had direct elections for prime minister in the 1990s, and it was an utter failure. The main parties massively lost seats and ended up being too small to be able to manage a stable coalition and an effective government, and two of the three governments formed after direct elections for prime minister held office for less than two years.
Israel is clearly in desperate need of a change that will create greater stability in its political system and more accountability from its representatives but these proposals, at this time, with one person in particular in mind, are not the right ones.
MKs should remember the adage that hard cases make bad law. The divisive and extreme situation to which Israeli politics has descended should not be the basis for rushing a general law into the books that would shackle the system in the future.
What is needed now, is for politicians to put their egos and boycotts aside and to try to work together for the good of the country in the long run. Then, with a functioning government, and working in legislative committees where the full range of political positions in the Knesset are expressed, Israel can get the electoral reform it truly needs.