The Beauty Of The American Electoral System; The Mess Of Parliamentary Systems
By
Leonard Zwelling
“I believe in America,” is the first line in The Godfather. I do, too.
I have marveled at the wisdom of those who wrote the Constitution over 200 years ago, how that document has stayed relevant, and how, no matter how past and current presidents have tried to destroy our constitutional government, they have failed.
There has been more than enough pontificating on cable news about the midterm election results. I am not going to do another post-mortem analysis. I want to bask in the glow of the fact that millions of Americans voted. They made their choices known. There was no violence. The President of the United States said he will abide by the results. We did it again. We overturned the government and no one fired a shot.
I am also in awe of the fact that many Americans voted differently than they had just two years before. The party in power in the White House and the Congress will no longer be a monolithic bloc under the thumb of a single man. Americans made it quite clear that is not the government they want.
I believe America voted against corruption. America voted against the cowardly leadership in Congress. America, once again, voted for change. Americans may be a restless populace with seemingly limited attention spans, but they know when they are being fleeced. They had had enough.
Finally, you have to be impressed that the American result was unambiguous and largely uncontested. The party that was out of power gained a large number of seats in Congress. We shall see what they can do for the American people. If they legislate poorly, their fate may well be the same as those defeated politicians who broke promises, started wars, and ignored the plight of the middle class. This cuts both ways. Those who triumphed now have to prove their value to those who put them in office or they may be on the sidelines again.
Almost nothing that I just wrote is true about the aftermath of the recent election in Israel. The biggest issues in Israel were security, the on-going (and seemingly perpetual) state of war, the lack of accountability for October 7, and the future of the independent judiciary. Some of these issues resemble those troubling voters in the U.S., particularly war. What America sent Mr. Trump is a clear signal that American voters are against his Iranian adventurism and its effects on the price of gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer. There is no such singular statement from the Israeli public about the future of Israel’s relationship with Iran or of just about any other issue plaguing the Jewish state.
In fact, while the U.S. election is pretty much over and the results in, Israel is still no closer to having new leadership beyond Mr. Eisenkot being tapped to try to form a government. He will have no more than six weeks to do so.
This blog has outlined the vagaries of the Israeli parliamentary system. People vote for parties. The results gave each of the parties some number of seats in the 120-member Knesset. Rarely does a party get 61 seats on its own and so must rely on coalition building by aligning with a few of the other parties.
Unlike the U.S. which has two major parties, Israel has many and even the two top vote getters, Netanyahu and Eisenkot, didn’t even have 30 seats each on their own. Currently they are horse trading trying to formulate a credible collection of partners. Eisenkot and his supports were the first to woo the Israeli president to choose them to try to form a government.
The questions that remain are:
- Will either Netanyahu (unlikely) or Eisenkot try to include either or both of the Arab parties in a coalition government despite having pledged not to do so before the voting began?
- Will Eisenkot try to form a Zionist coalition that omits both the Arabs and the Haredim (Orthodox) parties but does include the more radical elements of Netanyahu’s past coalition, the extremists and settlers who advocated for more and more West Bank settlements and probably favor the annexation of the West Bank?
- Could Netanyahu and Eisenkot form a government with their own seats plus a few more? I really doubt that.
Here’s a key difference between the democracy of America and its bicameral legislative system and the parliamentary unicameral system in Israel. In America we got an answer. The people spoke. They want change. They want less corruption in the White House. They want no more war. They want their economic status to improve.
In Israel, it appears that most Israelis, while uncomfortable with the constant state of war, will do anything to prevent another October 7 including having a continued presence in Gaza until Hamas is defeated. And the majority of Israeli Jews do not want Arabs in their government, even as those Arabs make up 20% of the Israeli citizenry. Jewish Israelis may be more concerned about that than even they are with investigating who fell down on the job on October 7 and why 18-year-old Haredis are not conscripted into the IDF. Neither Netanyahu nor Eisenkot is likely to stand down in Gaza nor stop the creation of new settlements on the West Bank. Maybe Eisenkot will keep the settlers from killing West Bank Arabs. Maybe.
During the two presidencies of Donald Trump, the American political system has withstood one of the greatest challenges to its survival in American history and triumphed. The Constitution has held. Our recent election was all about change and everyone on both sides got the message, except Mr. Trump who is making Stephen Miller his new Chief of Staff to increase confrontation with the Democrats.
In Israel, because of the nature of its parliamentary system, the lack of a formal constitution, and the fact that a clear winner may not emerge quickly as one almost always does in the U.S., things are still murky.
After an election, one always hopes things are clear. In the U.S. they are, whether or not you believe this was a referendum on Trump. The people expressed their dismay and dissatisfaction with the status quo. No one could argue with that.
In Israel, the future is muddled. Without a constitution and with so many parties, the result will be weeks in the making.
In another parliamentary government in the United Kingdom with hundreds of years of parliamentary experience, there still seems to be a constant churn of new prime ministers with very short tenures. If all that doesn’t give you pause at the genius of the Founders of the United States, you aren’t paying attention.
Now if we could just get rid of the Electoral College so that everyone’s vote really does count equally.
