A lesson on Israel's election

Well, Israel had its election yesterday. Everyone over eighteen years of age can vote and anyone over twenty-one can run in the State of Israel where the electoral system is an extreme form of proportional representation. Voters vote for a party list (of candidates). Any party list garnering 2% of the national vote will qualify for allocation of parliamentary seats in the Knesset. The number of Knesset seats each list receives is proportional to the number of votes it received. So, we divide the votes garnered by a qualifying party's list by 120 (the number of Knesset seats). Yesterday, 12 lists received enough votes to send winning candidates to the Knesset. 12 political parties in a parliament of 120 seats! The party list of Kadima (Hebrew: Forward) has 21.8% total vote, yielding 28 seats. What follow are parties getting 20, 13, 12, 11, 9, 7, 6, 4, 4, 3, and 3 seats. The three biggest parties, Kadima(28), Labor(20) and Likud(11), together won only 59 seats. Anyway, the rules state: the president asks the party leader, Kadima's Ehud Olmert, with the most seats to form the next government. Olmert has 45 days to do it and then the Knesset will vote to approve the cabinet, kind of like a confidence vote. Now, onto the politics. Internationally, the campaign issue is the Wall and withdrawal of Jewish/Israeli settlements from Palestinian West Bank; Kadima and Labor are pro- and Likud is anti-withdrawal. Fiscally, Likud is unpopular because it had a history in government with cutting social funding and services in order to reduce the deficit while the Pensioners of Israel party advocates evidently increasing pension payouts. Then, the various parties spread out like colours in the rainbow. On the Left, Labor had union roots, Meretz-Yachad had socialist roots and Hadash had Communist roots. Ethnically, Balad and the United Arab List are Arab parties; Yisrael Beytenu is Russian. On the Jewish side, there are Shas, National Union-National Religious Party, United Torah Party. That's it--twelve parties!!! Twelve parties to haggle over the annual budget. Each Knesset member is a "kingmaker" who can tip the balance of power when sixty-one is what you need to form a majority coalition government. O.K., there are historical reasons for proportional representation due to the multitudes of opinion and opinion leaders at the time of Israel's founding. Now--Canada is not the same as Israel. Don't go there and start copying proportional representation. If Canada goes there, get ready for minority governments every time, always worried more about winning votes in parliament than governing.