By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
The unorthodox nature of electoral politics in Israel produced unusual results, netting a predictably unpredictable conclusion, according to Judy Lash Balint, a freelance writer from Seattle currently living in Jerusalem.
A freelance writer, Balint contributes articles to theMatzav.com, an unsponsored, non-political Web site that since its November 2001 launch has been depicting the day-to-day lives of Israelis during the intifada.
Judy Balint was in Seattle shortly after the elections and offered her insights on what was one of the most tumultuous ballots in the more than 50-year history of the Jewish state.
Balint, who works as a pollwatcher in her neighborhood, said working at the polls in Jerusalem is very different from being a poll worker in Seattle. Instead of voting for specific candidates, Israelis cast their ballots for the different parties, who in turn choose candidates for the Knesset.
“Parties there are much more of a social phenomenon,” explained Balint. “The large parties have clubs. The Likud member who lives in Kiryat Malachi will go to that club at least once a week, and hang out with his buddies. It’s part of who you are. People will say to you, ‘There’s no way I could vote for such and such a political party. The Likud is my home,’” she said.
As a result, political affiliations are stable over time, and even carry from one generation to the next. That makes the sea-change in Israeli voting patterns in the February election even more of a shock to the system.
That the Labor Party has fallen out of favor, and the disenchantment with current party leader Amram Mitzna was not a big surprise, she said, given both the mood felt on the Israeli street and its reflection in the polls leading up to Election Day. But the rise of smaller, fringe parties, both those that entered the Knesset and those that nearly reached the 1.5 percent threshold was an unexpected result this year.
Making a foray into political analysis, which she said she usually avoids, Balint explained the lopsided results as a response to Mitzna’s “categorical announcement that he would not participate in any unity government” and “that he quite forcefully articulated a proposal for unilateral withdrawal.” She passed out a list, taken from the Jerusalem Post, showing the actual number of votes that each party got, which she said was possibly more instructive than the percentages and numbers of Knesset seat each one had gotten.
According to that list, Likud had a total of more than 925,000 votes, with Labor’s second place finish barely topping 455,000.
“Less than one Israeli voter in five voted for the Labor Party,” Balint said. “In the decade of the ‘60s, it used to be that it was Labor that had twice as many [votes] as what was then Charut, which is the precursor of the Likud.”
Most elections since have had very close outcomes, with the two major blocs getting razor thin pluralities, but falling short of a controlling majority. This resulted in a series of coalition governments in which minor parties held the balance of power. While the Likud did not rise to a clear majority in the past two elections, they have held a commanding lead over their Labor adversaries.
Meretz, Labor’s “slightly-to-the-left” traditional ally also lost a surprising number of voters, ending with fewer than 165,000 ballots. It dropped down to just six seats in the new parliament.
“The biggest change, of course, and the biggest surprise,” she said, “was the growth in the Shinui Party” which has since signed on as Likud’s junior partner in Sharon’s new coalition government.
“Shinui has 386,000 votes, to Labor’s 455,000, so they are really chasing Labor,” Balint said. Shinui was formed four years ago as a breakaway party from Meretz with an agenda focused on animal rights and grew from six to 15 seats.
“I cannot tell you what Shinui actually stands for. I can tell you what they stand against,” Balint said. “They are against religious coercion, they are against the fact that we have to have religious marriages, that all those [lifecycle] things are run by the religious establishment.”
Shinui (which translates roughly as “Reform”) describes itself as a classic liberal party in the European tradition. Shinui stands for a secular Israeli state, unencumbered by what its members see as the excesses of the ultra-Orthodox influence. It distinguishes itself from the Labor Party by emphasizing its commitment to “free market” economics and disavowing “Socialist” policies.
Shinui supports the passage of more Basic Laws to consolidate a constitution for the country, starting with a Basic Law on Legislation, so that the legal framework is laid down, then a Law on Freedom of Religion to establish equality between the different streams of Judaism.
Whether they will have staying power, Balint said, is still an open question. She characterized the “very broad swath of people” who voted for Shinui as “the white middle class” of Israeli society, including many Russian immigrants who abandoned Natan Sharansky’s Yisrael B’Aliya to cast their ballot for a secular party.
“It has been quite clear for a long time that the Russian street is not interested any more in voting for parties that label them as Russian or as immigrants. Neither did they feel that Sharansky had done anything for them in a tangible way,” Balint said.
Balint pointed to two fringe parties, the far-right Herut and the Green Leaf Party, whose platform was based on the legalization of marijuana, that both garnered nearly enough votes to win a Knesset seat. Another curious result of the Israeli system, Balint said, was that the number of parties that failed to make the cut was almost as long as the list of those who did win Knesset seats.
With Sharon’s new government in place, and Shinui voters already complaining about its leadership reneging on campaign promises, the staying power of all of the leading parties will be closely watched over the next several months.