Each succeeding day brings news of another political party planning to run in the upcoming elections.
No matter that we are already suffering from an overabundance of political parties in the Knesset. It is this very profusion of parties that has made life so difficult for our prime ministers throughout the years.
At this stage, we need more political parties like we need another hole in the head.
In addition to the Likud and Labor, representing the mainstream views of right and left respectively, we have the more extreme rightists in Moledet and leftists in Meretz who can’t seem to find a home in the respective mainstream parties. We also traditionally have had the “single-issue” parties representing the nationalist religious, Sephardi religious, Ashkenazi religious, new immigrants, secular Arabs, fundamentalist Arabs, and the occasional odd duck like Tsomet or The Third Way.
Now appearing on the scene is a new centrist party claiming to be “the real thing.” It will be followed by a plethora of single-issue or narrow-constituency parties, claiming to represent various regions of the country or segments of society.
The centrist party, which will be headed by former Chief of General Staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak and Likud Knesset member Dan Meridor, is trying to carve out a spot for itself by claiming to have a found for itself a “nice place in the middle” between the Likud and Labor.
But considering the fact that Labor has abandoned its past socialist ideology and that the Likud has, albeit reluctantly, begun to reconcile itself to the Oslo accords, it is perplexing that a new party can try to squeeze itself, even edge-wise, into the disappearing middle ground between them.
At the same time, I have no doubt that the ill-conceived law for the direct election of the prime minister will help turn a bad situation into downright political chaos.
After first using it in the 1996 election, Israelis already know it spells trouble. With voters heading to the polls with two ballots in hand, they are almost irresistibly tempted to cast the second ballot for one of the minor parties.
The emphasis that places on the politicians who put forth their candidacies independent of their own parties inevitably detracts from the importance attached to party principles and policies.
If the coming elections follow the two-ballot system, the next Knesset will likely be a mosaic of mid-sized and small parties. Governing the country will become next to impossible.
And if it turns out that the centrist party’s platform doesn’t differ significantly from that of one of the two major parties, what does it matter, as long as its candidate for prime minister seems to have an attractive personality?
We seem to be well on the way to emptying our political discourse of all intellectual content to the great detriment of democratic governance
Another phenomenon, that seems to be gaining momentum, is the abandonment of the Likud by a number of its senior politicians, a process that could lead to the disintegration of a party that has been one of the mainstays of our political scene for decades. Even the Likud’s political opponents should find little solace in that.
Since the days of Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Chaim Weizmann, two rival schools of thought have contended for supremacy — first in the World Zionist Organization and later on the Israeli political scene. The Likud Party, heir to Jabotinsky’s Revisionist-Zionist movement, stands for the more hawkish or conservative position on the Jewish-Arab conflict. The Labor Party, heir to Mapai, advocates the more dovish view and more risk-taking in an attempt to reach an accommodation with the Arabs.
Throughout the years, the discourse between these two major parties, jarring and discomforting as it may have been at times, was essential in forming our foreign and defense policies. It was, and should continue to be, an essential element of adversary policy formulation.
The tremor presently shaking the Likud may bring about a significant asymmetry in the political debate.
Is it too late for politicians to return to their home bases, for the leaders of the centrist party to acknowledge that they are destined to be a “virtual” party, and for Israel to return to being a parliamentary democracy? I hope not.