Mark Mellman: No easy win in Israel

By the time you read this, headlines will likely have proclaimed a “winner” in Israel’s election. 

However, because of Israel’s complex system, the real winner may remain a mystery for some time.

{mosads}Reaching the prime minister’s chair in Israel is a three-part process. 

Tuesday was Stage 1: the election, based on national proportional representation. Voters across the country cast ballots for a party, not for individuals and not for prime minister. 

Any party garnering at least 3.25 percent of the vote gets a percentage of the seats in the Knesset close to the percentage of the national vote it receives. You get 18 percent of the national vote, you get (roughly) 18 percent of the seats.

With 26 parties competing, the winner won’t get close to 50 percent. With 18 percent of the vote, you’re a contender; with 25 percent, you’re a king. 

Because no party will win a 61-seat majority, the process enters Stage 2, where Israel’s mostly honorific president takes center stage. He meets with each party leader in the new Knesset to ask who they recommend for prime minister. 

President Reuven Rivlin will then ask the leader he judges best able to assemble a coalition to see whether he can cobble together the requisite 61-seat majority. 

In Stage 3, the wheeling and dealing begins in earnest, though the horse-trading will have started even before the president meets with the party leaders. 

The president’s choice will have to bring together under one umbrella parties that want to head the same ministries (parceling out ministries is a prime currency of coalition building) and hew to very different issue positions. 

How different? Look at it this way: Tzipi Livni was the first leader to join Benjamin Netanyahu’s last coalition. Yet he maintains that her behavior caused the need for new elections 20 months later. 

Or consider this: Parties campaign, in part, by saying they will refuse to join a coalition if some ideological foe is also included. But building a governing coalition will likely require at least one party to violate those promises.

If the gaps can’t be bridged and the president’s first choice fails to assemble a coalition within 42 days, he entrusts his second and then third choice with the task. If the three all fail, new elections are held.

By all accounts, two candidates are vying for the nod: Netanyahu, the incumbent, and Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog. 

Public reaction to them both is complex. A large majority does not want Netanyahu to serve as prime minister again, but a plurality would choose him over Herzog. One candidate is widely disliked and the other faces real questions about his abilities.

Using the averages of the final week’s polls, merely for illustration, reveals the daunting task each would face in assembling a coalition. 

Herzog leads Netanyahu by 3 seats, but only earns 24. Indeed, Labor (aka Zionist Union) together with its natural central-left allies pick up a total of 42 seats (with the Arab parties historically refusing to join any coalition), while Netanyahu and his natural allies are projected to win 43 seats, according to the poll average. 

That puts the final decision on who becomes prime minister in two sets of hands. One is a party led by a former Netanyahu ally who created his own faction after falling out with the prime minister. The other is a coalition of ultra-orthodox parties, which, together, might claim 14 seats. 

The preferred home of the ultra-orthodox (oversimplifying, the black hat and side-curls crowd) is the right, but they are angry at Netanyahu for collaborating with (full disclosure: my client) centrist Yair Lapid, requiring them to serve in the Army and work. These parties have maintained good relations with Herzog, who didn’t support Lapid’s conscription law and whose grandfather served as chief rabbi. 

So read the stories anointing a winner with a grain of salt, sit back and wait. 

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has worked for Democratic candidates and causes since 1982. Current clients include the minority leader of the Senate and the Democratic whip in the House.