I hate to say I told you, but I did. Way back in February. The day after the sort-of-democratic Israeli national elections.
Finally, after thousands of miles of ink and electronic coverage, the real Israeli elections are taking place. And they have absolutely nothing to do with the voting public.
Let's review for a minute. The Phase 1 elections took place on a rainy day in February. The results were neck-in-neck between Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu. Tzipi had the slightest bit of a majority, but she did not have enough votes to get her a majority government. Not even close.
That's when Phase 2 of the election began. Livni and Netanyahu both tried to convince the leaders of the other parties to join them in a variety of coalition arrangements. Livni, having not planned well for that eventuality, was left out in the cold and essentially politically out-manouevered by the more experienced Netanyahu. He already had commitments form several of the small right-wing parties that they would join a Likud (Netanyahu's party) coalition in the event that there was a need for such a coalition.
Now Netanyahu could have been satisfied with that. He had enough mandates to achieve the necessary 65 required to form a majority-sort of government. But.... Netanyahu being Netanyahu, this apparently wasn't to be. That's when he set out to woo pretty much anyone of any political stripe -- he wants to create a really representative government. Isn't that what elections are supposed to do? Government for the people, by the people?
I am not going to comment on his actual choices because I am not in the mood to sit here for a week typing all the possible machinations. Let's just say that at this point pretty much everyone is angry at him.
The most remarkable part of the process for me is that he didn't receive enough mandates to even win the first round of the elections, yet he appears to be the new prime minister elect. Don't get me wrong, I am not particularly unhappy with that, but I don't get it. Don't the numbers actually mean something? (hahaha... soon as I wrote that I realized how funny it was.)
So here we are more than a month after what could have been a real election and Netanyhu has gone to the figure-head president, Shimon Peres, to ask for more time to form a coalition government. Of course he is going to get that time because the alternative is to go back to the polls and that is not going to make tax-payers very happy and it is going to even further destroy Israel's credibility in the democratic western world. This makes the US's dangling chad issue look like child's play.
I can't help but wonder what will happen if heaven-forbid there is some sort of catastrophe (it can happen here; this isn't Canada) in Israel and no one is truly in charge. We really need someone to mind the store now. Even I am ready to give up on democracy if it means we can have closure.
In the end what it comes down to is this: If Netanyahu forms a right wing government he'll have a coalition ready to side with him on many of the things the likud voters want to see accomplished but the world will howl and put pressure on to stop them happening. If he goes with a centrist government the world will be quieter buyt the parties he's with won't allow him to do any of the things that he wants to do. So he can either get everything he wants and be able to do almost nothing or get nothing he wants and be able to do most of it.
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