Attention: Youth Group Leaders and Advisors
A voter would vote twice
when he enters the polls;
once for his district repre-
sentative, once for a national
list.
Another change would be
raising the election
threshhold from the one per-
cent of the vote now required
to send an Israeli to the
Knesset. Under some reform
proposals, a party must be
able to get four candidates
elected to qualify for the
Knesset. In this way, the
number of parties elected
would be reduced from more
than a dozen today to seven
or nine, Carmon says. The
diversity of Israeli society
still would be reflected while
giving the major parties a
more manageable share of
the pie.
On the plus side, this
system would elect Knesset
members beholden to voters
as well as to their parties. It
also would "put pressure on
the parties to send better
candidates to the districts,"
Carmon says.
The second goal of elec-
toral reform, strengthening
Israelis cannot
neatly be
converted into
Republicans and
Democrats.
governability, could be
achieved by an innovation
Cannon calls the prime min-
ister's government.
Some proponents of elec-
toral reform have called for a
direct election of the prime
minister — something akin
to the American presidential
election — as the solution to
the problem of governabili-
ty. Carmon says this would
be dangerous without con-
stitutional reform. To have a
strong executive branch,
Israel must first have a
strong network of checks
and balances, something the
state now lacks.
In addition, in a country
divided down the middle, a
majority election would
solve little, according to Pro-
fessor Arend Lijphart of the
University of California at
San Diego, an expert on po-
litical reform. "One party's
policies could be reversed if
the other party took over,"
he says.
The prime minister's
government is the workable
alternative to direct elec-
tion, Carmon says. Accor-
ding to the plan, instead of
the prime minister being the
politician able to put
together a 61 seat majority
coalition, the prime minister
will be the head of the party
that wins the most seats. "So
we will know one hour after
the election who will be
prime minister," Carmon
says.
This system will
discourage dragged-out co-
alition bargaining and en-
courage the formation of po-
litical blocs before elections,
Carmon says. The small left-
wing parties would make
deals with Labor before, not
after, the elections, as would
the small rightist parties
with Likud. The religious
parties would curb their
post-election demands
because they would know
that only one person has a
chance of being prime min.-
ister, instead of playing the
large parties, against each
other at coalition-building
time.
But even these modest
proposals have their
weaknesses. There are
possible scenarios where
where popularly elected
local candidates may not
make it into the Knesset
because their party fails to
gain enough national seats
to reach the election thresh-
old.
And there are problems
with the concept of represen-
tative districts.
"Does north Tel Aviv want
to have north Tel Aviv na-
tionalism?" says David
Twersky, a political analyst
who lived in Israel for 12
years.
"It's the national security •
consensus that's broken
down, not the electoral
system," Twersky says.
"We're fooling ourselves in
thinking we're going to
change the Israeli consensus
by a tactical maneuver [like
electoral reform]."
And all these plans and
discussions are merely
academic without an answer
to the crucial question, "Has
reform any chance of passing
the Knesset?" _
"The chances are probably
better today than 10 years
ago," says Professor Asher
Arian of City University of
New York. "But on the
whole, chances are only
fair."
As part of the Labor-Likud
coalition agreement, the two
major parties agreed to
reach an electoral reform ac-
cord by January 1990, Car-
mon says. As a realist, he's
not holding his breath.
"There are agreements
and there is reality. I
wouldn't put my money on
having electoral reform by
1990."
The political reality is that
Labor and Likud are not in a
rush to reform the system,
says one observer. ❑
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