The 19th Knesset is Formed, at Great Cost to the 20th Knesset

This week Benyamin Netanyahu built a coalition, securing himself a third term as Israeli Prime Minister. He will shortly become the longest serving Prime Minister of Israel since David Ben Gurion.

While his retention of this top spot was all but assured going into the election, it was also widely assumed that he would be in a more perilous political situation following the election, and that has certainly proved to be the case.

Likud and Yisrael Beitanyu merged together for the purposes of this election. In the 18th Knesset, the two parties separately contained 42 seats. In the 19th Knesset, combined, they dropped to 31 seats. Jewish Home — headed by Naftali Bennett, a previous chief-of-staff to Netanyahu — and Yesh Atid — headed by Yair Lapid, a newsman and author, new to the Israeli political scene – picked up 12 and 19 seats respectively. Despite some major ideological deviations (Lapid wants a wall between Israel and the West Bank; Bennett wants Israel to fully annex the West Bank), these two parties created a united front for negotiations and have been functioning in many ways as a single party. (As a single party bloc, that puts them equal in Knesset seats to Likud Beitanyu!) Netanyahu, in building his coalition, has also has been forced to rely on two men that clearly want his job and are both well on their way to being in the running for it.

On Thursday, it was announced that Netanyahu had built his coalition. His deadline to do so (with the two-week extension he had already taken) was Friday. Then the deal “hit a snag.” Along with their Ministries, Bennett and Lapid were both to be given the title of Deputy Prime Minister. It has been widely reported (and of course denied) that Sara Netanyahu, Bibi’s wife, “vetoed” allowing Bennett the entirely honorary title.

Whatever the whole story of the coalition negotiations, on Friday the deal was signed and Bibi secured another term as Israeli Prime Minister. The coalition will consist of 68 seats (61 are needed to govern): 31 from Likud Beitanyu, 19 from Yesh Atid, 12 from Jewish Home and 6 from Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua.

This coalition is the first in decades to not include the ultra-Orthodox parties, of which there are currently two in Knesset with a combined 18 seats. Netanyahu wanted to bring them in, but Lapid and Bennett would not allow it. Both of their parties platforms include proposed changes to the draft exemptions for the Orthodox, aiming to bring Orthodox conscription in line with that of secular Israel. And Lapid and Bennett have secured themselves strong positions to enact something that has been extremely controversial in Israel for over a generation, drafting the orthodox into military or national service.

Along with agreeing to sideline the Orthodox parties and work towards a stricter law requiring military service from the Orthodox, Netanyahu had to accept several demands from his new partners, Lapid in particular, in order to achieve this deal. These changes are primarily about strengthening the ability of the Knesset to function. The number of ministers in the Knesset will drop to 22, down almost a third from the last Knesset.  There will be no ministers-without-portfolio in this Knesset. It will take 65 MKs to topple the government. MKs who split from their factions will not be eligible for funds allocated to political parties. And perhaps most significantly, the election threshold (the percentage of the vote that a party will need to receive in order to obtain seats) will be raised from 2 percent to 4 percent.

Israel has always had a historically low threshold required to enter the Knesset (it used to be 1 percent), as compared to other such parliamentary governments (most countries using such systems range between 3-5 percent, although Russia requires 7 percent and Turkey 10 percent). In a country with such a small population as Israel, this low threshold meant that relatively marginalized parties could gain seats in Knesset, and perhaps more significantly, that more parties would receive fewer seats, making it more difficult to build a coalition or for coalitions to govern.

In this election, a quarter million votes were cast for parties that did not break the 2 percent threshold. With 3.8 million people voting in this election, that means that about one in 15 votes went to a party that would not have a seat in the government had this change already been enacted.

Furthermore, four parties WILL enter the Knesset who reached the 2 percent threshold, but not the 4 percent threshold. Kadima, the party with the largest contingent of seats in the outgoing Knesset at 28, received just 2.1 percent of the vote this time around.  Three other parties who will sit in the 19th Knesset would not sit in the 20th Knesset, assuming similar numbers, based on this raised threshold. They are the United Arab List, Hadash and Balad, Israel’s three Arab parties. Arabs make up 20 percent of Israel but historically hold right around 10 percent of Knesset seats. (This can be attributed to infighting or disenfranchisement, depending on your chosen level of cynicism.) In this election, they took a combined 11 seats (just under 10 percent). But individually, none of these three parties crossed the 4 percent threshold.

This change will either force the Arab parties to merge together or find other ways to better work together in the next round of elections. Or it will result in their exclusion from the next Knesset altogether.

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