Did the girl win?

Yesterday was national Election Day in Israel. If you think you have seen democracy at its best, that's great. Because you surely won't see that here. Instead, what you will see is democracy in its most contorted format.

For those of you who do not understand the Israeli political system (I am guessing that that includes pretty much everyone on earth), let me give you a very brief and superficial overview.

Members of each party rank their potential Knesset members. Needless to say, that involves a lot of backroom negotiations and I am sure it isn't pretty. It is essentially a private, members only sort of affair, so there is definitely no democracy in the candidate selection process.

Then, when an election is called, each party puts up posters and makes speeches. Some of the parties have platforms, and frankly, some do not. For some, the only platform they need is that they are "left" or "right" of another party. For some other parties, the fact that all the candidates wear a certain colour yarmulke, is platform enough. Essentially, the colour of the yarmulke defines their belief system and hence, their political beliefs.

To win a seat in the Knesset, a party must get enough popular votes to win a mandate. I think a mandate is 1000 votes, but I am not sure. Yes, you can have part of a mandate .. and if you get a part of a mandate, that gives you negotiation power that you will definitely AFTER the public election (when the real election process begins).

Now, since there are so many political parties, it is impossible for one party to form the government alone. This is where part three of the never ending political process takes place. The party with the most mandates after the public election, must go out and negotiate with other smaller parties to join the government. Rest assured, this comes at a price and it means that if you voted for the party that got the most mandates, it doesn't matter.... you may not see the things that you consider important ever implemented because that party had to negotiate with other parties to ensure they became the government -- and heaven only knows what they gave up in the process.

Believe it or not, most Israeli elections (and in Israel there are lots of them) run relatively smoothly like this. However, last night's election did not. The Kadimah Party won the popular vote by one mandate and .... The Likud Party, which lost by one mandate, is part of the larger philosophical block of Right Wingers.

What does that mean you may ask?

It means that while one party won more seats, another party and its accompanying political philosophy won more seats through the combined efforts of more political parties with the same shared political philosophy -- sort of.

And now, today, the real election process begins. It will take place in the backrooms, away from the public who theoretically voted all of these people into power. There will be backstabbing, deals made, deals broken, and deals renegotiated. And in the end, some group of political parties will surface as the winner. That will probably take until the end of next week.

If you ever studied political science you will immediately recognize that the ideas of democracy developed over many centuries by the likes of Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and so on, simply don't exist here. Instead it is what I like to call, The Democracy of Necessity. It's a bastardized democracy that could only thrive in the Middle East, and more specifically, Israel.

However, with all that said, in my house, it came down to one thing. When my nine-year-old daughter Yael got out of bed today and heard us discussing the election in the kitchen, she yelled down to us: "Did the girl (Tzipi Livni) win?"