Lessons from the Israel 2015 election

There is no point in discussing the ins and outs of yesterday's national elections. Heaven knows it has been analyzed to death and this morning, it is all over but the crying -- for some, tears of joy and for others, plain old tears.

But as with everything in life, there have definitely been some valuable lessons learned.

1.The Israeli media screwed themselves. It is a commonly known fact that most of the media in Israel is left leaning and overwhelmingly anti-Bibi. For the past two weeks, as election day neared, they were falling over themselves to play up the ever-increasing gap between the Zionist Union and Likud, particularly since the polls continued to predict that the Zionist Union was heading to a healthy and inevitable win. What they did not anticipate was, that while that may have seemed to be the case, the tedious message definitely got through to people who were either on the fence or arm-chair rightist who may not have voted, to get their acts together and vote Likud.

2. Israelis need a Sunday. Maybe not actually Sunday because that is kind of Christian-ish but a real day off once a week. People were everywhere yesterday, just enjoying the day. Yes, basic services were open but most people were out with the families or relaxing at home. It was civilized beyond words.

3. Rabbi Ovadia was sms'ing people who did not vote for his old political party, Shas. After being the guest-of-honour at the largest funeral ever held in Jerusalem and bringing traffic in the holy city to a screeching halt for several hours on October 8, 2013, I think it is a little chutzpadik for him to be sending hate mail now. Even from Olam Abah, he can unnerve people and make them rethink their election choices. The lesson here: Never upset a great man -- even after he is dead.

4. When polling and campaigning ends .... your neighbours will step in to fill the gap. I purposely left to go vote at a time of day that I thought would be less popular with most of the voters in my neighbourhood. Wrong. I found myself walking and talking with people who know me superficially or not at all. Of course, they quickly sized me up as a religious "American" (apparently it only takes about five seconds for the experienced eye) and proceeded to tell me why I had to vote for the Zionist Union rather than my original choice. It's important to add that they did not know who my initial candidate of choice was, but they assumed that it couldn't be anyone they would vote for. I learned more about what the average wo/man on the street in Ra'anana thought of the election than I did from weeks of reading the news.

I am sure there are many more lessons that will become apparent over the next few weeks as Bibi tries to put together a coalition (who many of those who voted for him will barely be able to tolerate). I am sure that there will be regrets and hopefully a few pleasant surprises. I also hope that whoever governs this country will have good sense and moral fibre. And in the end, we all know that in Israel coalitions never last and we will probably be back in the midst of a national election within two years.

And now it's time for the real Israeli elections to begin

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.

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?"