How did Israel’s government become so right-wing?

Does the Israeli electoral system of proportional representation result in unstable coalitions and elected extremists?

Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich

In a previous post (and also in the Washington Post), I examined the defects of the electoral system used in the Palestinian elections in 2006. Specifically, in the parallel system which combined “winner take all” at-large elections with a proportional representation (PR) system, the PR method resulted in a fair “votes-to-seats” distribution, but the distortions of the "winner take all" method resulted in Hamas winning 68 percent of the seats with only 41 percent of the popular vote. Overall, Hamas won a solid 56 percent majority of seats despite winning a minority of the popular vote, and not that many more votes than its chief opposition, Fatah.

This unrepresentative election result led to further civil strife between Hamas and Fatah, which eventually erupted in civil war between the two leading Palestinian factions, followed by separation into two tribal enclaves – Gaza controlled by Hamas and the West Bank controlled by Fatah. The 2006 election was the last legislative election that the Palestinians organized. The bitter Palestinian split has made negotiations with Israel over a two-state solution even more difficult, even beyond the usual Israeli obstruction of the process.

But what about Israel’s elections, and its specific electoral method of proportional representation? Has that contributed to Israeli obstructionism? The current government is among the most right-wing and religious-dominated in its history. Is that the result of defects in Israel’s own democratic design?

Does PR lead to unstable coalitions and extremists?

Among the standard critique of proportional representation electoral systems has been the alleged “Israel and Italy problem” – that low victory thresholds (the percentage of seats a party needs for winning representation) either elect too many political parties and lead to unstable coalition governments; or allow extremists to get elected; or both.

Looking at the current Israeli government, as well as previous ones, there is no question that Israel has had many unstable governments, and has elected right-wing religious extremists to a number of influential offices. For example, when Israel had its last election in November 2022, that was its fifth election in less than four years. Two elections were held in 2019, and others in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Coalition governments have been lasting about as long as a popsicle at the equator.

And in terms of electing extremists, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet contains several elected Zionist and religious fanatics with long documented histories of stirring up racist hate against Palestinians and Arabs. Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a Jewish supremacist elected from the far-right Jewish Power party who now oversees the Israeli police and security forces that operate in the occupied West Bank. He was convicted in the past for supporting a terror organization and inciting racism, campaigned for the release of the far right assassin of Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin who had signed a peace deal with the Palestinians, and during his election victory speech last November some of his supporters started chanting “death to the Arabs.” Since taking office, he has overseen a rapid expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories.

His political partner, Bezalel Smotrich, who is Finance Minister in the Netanyahu government and leader of the Religious Zionism party, has a history of making racist remarks about Arab citizens of Israel and opposes Palestinian statehood. Smotrich has labeled Arab lawmakers in the Israeli Knesset as “enemies” who are “here by mistake,” and said the murder of a Palestinian family by Jewish settlers was not terrorism. He is also a longtime proponent of turning Israel into a theocracy governed by religious Hebrew law, and he called a gay pride parade “worse than bestiality.”

The rise of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir is emblematic of a fundamental extreme rightward shift in Israeli politics. After the last election, Israel’s outgoing prime minister Yair Lapid warned in a televised address, “The government established here is dangerous, extreme, irresponsible… This will end badly.” Referring to Ben-Gvir, Lapid asked: “Show me a state in the world where the man responsible for the police is a violent criminal with 53 indictments and eight convictions for serious offenses.” The far-right vanguard of Israeli politics now comprises nearly a quarter of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, and the ideas of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir were increasingly driving governmental policies well before the October 7 massacre.

So while the world recognizes the extremes of Hamas, that reality should be understood in the context of this Israeli government being one of the most fanatical in its troubled history. And it has come during a time of great instability in its coalition governments. In fact, some have argued that the rightward drift has come as a result of the instability in coalition governments. And the main source of that instability is none other than Netanyahu himself.

Much of the instability stems from charges in 2019 against Netanyahu of corruption and bribery, with each election essentially becoming a referendum on his leadership and moral character. To undermine the legal case against him, Netanyahu tried, in very Trump-like fashion, to undermine the legal system itself. Much like the twisted attempts by the recently defeated right-wing government in Poland, Netanyahu has tried to make the Supreme Court subservient to the executive branch, i.e. himself as prime minister, resulting in massive protests across the country, including among soldiers.

Reading the annals of these recent Israeli elections, one after the other, is like watching a slow motion train wreck because we know where it ends – with the Machiavellian Netanyahu, willing to form a coalition with whatever political parties would help him to stay out of jail. The far-right parties were the only ones willing to co-sign legislation to abrogate his ongoing corruption trial. The most crass of political instincts resulted in a government that is not only headed by a villainous Trump-like figure but also is being swayed by extremist cabinet members even more fanatical than Trump. Israel’s creaky democratic institutions are now shaking on their timbers.

So the situation today in Israel appears to confirm the worst fears about proportional representation elections leading to unstable coalition governments and electing extremists. Of course, most of the world’s established democracies use some form of proportional representation system, and most of them do not suffer from these breakdowns. So there is more at work here than the usual stereotype of PR that one hears from many political scientists. Israel is a fairly complex place, a puzzle wrapped inside a mystery rolled inside an enigma.

Israel’s proportional voting method defies stereotypes

Indeed, considering the results of Israel’s recent elections suggests that there are deeper tensions within Israeli society that the electoral system cannot resolve.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the Israeli system of PR is a very low victory threshold for winning seats, one of the lowest in the world. The threshold for the 2013 elections was 2%, but in 2014 the Knesset voted to raise the threshold to 3.25%. Conventional wisdom would suggest that raising the threshold should lower to some degree the number of parties winning seats and the number of parties in the ruling coalition, making it less cumbersome. In the elections of 2003, 2006 and 2009, under the old two percent threshold, an average of 12.3 parties got elected. An average of 6.3 minor parties finished with five percent of the popular vote or less, and of those smaller parties an average of 3.0 were Arab-oriented, 2.0 were Jewish rightist and 1.0 were leftist.

Starting in the election of 2015, after the victory threshold was increased to 3.2% — a sizable 62 percent increase — the number of elected parties did decline a bit to an average of 10 per election. Also declining were the number of elected parties with less than five percent of the vote, to an average of 2.8 per election. But also declining were the number of elected Arab parties and left parties, while the number of religious right parties increased, a number of them crossing the five percent threshold.

For several elections, Arab parties coalesced together to form a Joint List in order to ensure that the Arab perspective was represented, which was partially successful. But the right wing Jewish parties gained in strength, with the Religious Zionist party of Bezalel Smotrich first winning seats in the March 2021 election with five percent of the vote, and by the November 2022 election his was the third-largest party with almost 11 percent of the vote. Smotrich was getting himself into position to play the role of kingmaker when Netanyahu needed support to become prime minister. That opportunity would come as a result of the 2022 elections.

How an extreme, polarizing figure like Netanyahu trashed the electoral system

In the 2022 election, just as in most of the previous elections, the country’s electorate was split down the middle into pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps. But in 2022, due to a quirk of the Israeli political system, Netanyahu was able to outmaneuver his opponents. His right wing coalition won only about 48.5% of the popular vote, but he was able to turn that into a slight majority – 63 seats out of 120 – and form his right wing religious-dominated government.

How did he do it? With a victory threshold of 3.25 percent, Netanyahu’s allies were all safely above that line. But several parties on the anti-Netanyahu side fell below it and failed to win election, including the leftist Meretz, and one major Arab party which together had over six percent of the vote. If these parties had made it over the line, their votes would have been counted when it came to figuring out final vote shares in the parliament. That would have prevented Netanyahu’s slim majority.

In fact, the situation was even quirkier than that. This dilemma of how to get the necessary number of moderate parties over the threshold was well-known, and so the lead party in the anti-Netanyahu coalition, Yesh Atid led by then-prime minister Yair Lapid, tried to figure out how he could grow his own party share of the vote without cannibalizing that of his allies and inadvertently pushing them under the threshold. He was forced to do a delicate campaign dance to avoid stealing seats from his allies. Some observers felt the incumbent prime minister was campaigning with one hand tied behind his back. His efforts failed, and Netanyahu won a bare majority of seats.

The end result was that, although the Israeli far right garnered just 10 percent of the popular vote, it is now in a position to exercise outsized authority in a coalition that cannot function without its support.

The brutal and murderous bombing of Gaza civilians notwithstanding, Netanyahu has tried to allay fears that the right wing extremists are the tail that wags the dog of his administration. But as others have observed, then why didn’t he build a government with the country’s center parties, many of whom have served in coalition with him in the past? Instead, he chose the far right because of the deal they were willing to strike to stop his corruption trial. “Enabling extremists was Netanyahu’s only play to maintain power,” writes The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg.

Aggregate impacts of PR in Israel

So when you add up the effects of Israel’s “closed list proportional” electoral method, it’s clear that it is not so easy to reduce the number of elected extremists and their influence, or prop up stable coalitions, by merely raising the victory threshold. As we have seen, in the 2022 election if the threshold had been lower then Meretz and another major Arab party would have won seats and the majority balance would have slightly shifted to the centrist Yesh Atid. And in previous elections, several of the smaller, most extreme right wing and religious parties were comfortably above the election threshold; it was the moderate Arab and left parties that struggled to win seats.

There was a slight disproportionality built into the election results with both the two largest parties, the right-wing Likud and the moderate Yesh Atid, winning 2 to 3 percent more seats than votes. And that disproportionality came at the expense of smaller parties on the left, right and center.

But overall the Israeli electoral system produced fair and proportional results. It just so happens that it reflects the range of sentiments held in Israel’s very polarized society. It does that much better than the US political system, where a GOP-minority is able to manipulate the geographic-based, “winner take all” system where extreme disproportionality in the federal Senate combined with the obstructionist filibuster, as well as in the distorted presidential election results in 2000 and 2016, has led to the most perverse form of minority rule.

But what that tells us is that Israeli society is extremely polarized, and with a representative system like PR, the legislature is bound to reflect that polarization. Beyond that, the deep-seated anti-Arab sentiment that, among a number of influential Israeli parties rises to the level of racism and discrimination, is being precisely expressed through its proportional voting system. A representative democracy is only as good as the people who use it.

In short, the PR electoral system in Israel has done its job, more or less - it has facilitated fair representation among the different perspectives that live in Israel, including the Israeli Palestinians. Until the Israelis decide that they want to live in peace with all of their Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians, and want to construct a two-state solution that will allow peace, there's not much that a different electoral system could do any better than what they have.

The real tragedy here is that, as I have previously written, Israel could become a key economic and technology hub for the region, and foster development and lead a badly needed regional renaissance involving many of its Arab neighbors. Only Israel has the economic power – including its special relationship with the US – to be a catalyst for such a vision. But Israel’s succession of terrible leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu, who has now dominated Israeli politics off and on for 16 years as prime minister, prefer to argue over who gets the olive trees instead of over how to maximize a modern regional economy. 

This is a time for Israeli leadership to exert the qualities that other great leaders throughout history have sometimes exhibited when called upon to heal wounds and bring people together. I'm thinking of leaders like Nelson Mandela after the fall of South African apartheid, or Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant after the civil war in the US, who consciously pushed policies of reconciliation rather than revenge. Unfortunately, at the current time Israel’s right-wing leadership is going in the opposite direction, of fanning the flames of extremism and hatred. This is a time when moral leadership and courage is greatly needed, but unfortunately it is sorely lacking. Arguably it is the missing ingredient that has been lacking since the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin (by a right-wing Israeli, no less). It's a sad and tragic affair.

As we stare at the horror of the massacre that is ripping up the lives of Gaza’s families and infrastructure, and before that the shocking Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, it makes one question one’s faith in representative democracy. It causes one to yearn for a benevolent power that can disarm the two warring sides and sit them down at the negotiating table to settle their differences.

It also calls to mind the cigar-stomping Winston Churchill’s warning: “Democracy is the worst form of government – except all the others that have been tried."

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776