Why Israeli Elections Never Produce a Clear Winner

Unpacking Israeli History - Unpacked

This episode of Unpacking Israeli History explores the complex and often confusing nature of Israel's electoral system, explaining why elect

Key takeaways

• Israel's electoral system is based on proportional representation, meaning voters choose parties rather than individual candidates, leading to a fragmented parliament.
• The threshold for entering the Knesset has risen from 1% to 3.25%, making it difficult for new or smaller parties to gain representation and discouraging strategic voting.

Main topics

• Proportional representation in Israeli elections
• The role of coalition governments in Israel

Notable quotes

"When you go into the ballot and you vote, you have boxes with many, many, many different sheets of paper that you can choose and put in the envelope."

"If he doesn't cross the threshold, so we'll give it to the Likud. You can't do that."

Conclusion

Israel's electoral system, designed for inclusivity and representation, often results in political deadlock

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) You may have heard about this amazing journal called Sapir. It's a quarterly journal of ideas, and it's edited by New York Times columnist Brett Stevens. And guess what? Sapir is something that really influences me personally. It has a wide range of ideas, a diversity of thought, and it makes a big difference on people like me. Every single issue of Sapir explores a theme that makes me think, and it shows different perspectives on that theme, whether it's activism or diversity or faith or Zionism. And it's featured incredibly thoughtful writers from Eynat Wilf to Tober Hellerstein to Roya Hakakian to Michael Koplow. And I've even written for Sapir. And I quote Sapir often in this podcast because of the different thinkers that they highlight. So if you appreciate this podcast and you've learned from this podcast, then Sapir might be for you. And here's the cool thing. You could receive four beautiful issues a year for free. right in your mailbox at home at no charge. It's free. You could get it. So subscribe today at sapirjournal.org slash noam, completely free of charge. That's sapirjournal.org slash noam. And I'll spell it for you. S-A-P-I-R-J-O-U-R-N-A-L dot org slash noam. N-O-A-M. I thought you would know how to spell that. And I figured you should know how to spell journal also. Anyway, click the link in the episode notes or just go to sapirjournal.org slash noam. It's all there, and I think you'll find it incredibly insightful. Hey, I'm Noam Weissman, and this is Unpacking Israeli History, the podcast that takes a deep dive into some of the most intense, historically fascinating, and often misunderstood events and stories linked to Israeli history. Before we start, as always, check us out on Instagram, on TikTok, on YouTube, all the places. Just search Unpacking Israeli History and hit the follow or subscribe button. And one more thing, I'm on Instagram. Check it out. Me, Noam Weissman. Noam L. Weissman underscore. Sometimes it's interesting. I think it is. I don't know. Maybe it's not. I think my wife likes it. Not sure. Anyway, follow the link in the description of this episode. Okay, yalla. Let's do this. Speaker 1 (2:20) Listen, if you like this episode and you just heard this on the ad, you're going to love Sapir. And I got to name that. It's a quarterly journal of ideas edited by Brett Stevens. You got to check it out. Subscribe for free at sapirjournal.org slash noam. Really, really, really check it out. It's awesome. It's awesome, awesome. All the brilliant ideas from diverse perspectives, the way good learning and education should be. Speaking of good learning and good education. Today's episode is about something many of us are very not educated about, and we want to learn a lot more about it. It's about Israeli elections. And when I say Israeli elections, it's not really an episode about the 2026 election alone, which is coming up very soon in like two months. We're not going to be focusing. I'm using the word focusing on candidates and predictions for this year. That's not my focus. I'm not the hot takes guy, as you know. What we wanted to do here is classic unpacking Israeli history style. Slow down, take a step back, and actually understand what's going on. What are Israeli elections all about? Israel doesn't have a president that you vote for directly. It doesn't have two parties. Nothing in Israel seems to work the way Americans expect. So today's about the system. It's about the system, not the outcome. And to speak about the system, to speak about the history, I am talking to Rachel Azaria. Rachel is exactly who, the way I view it, that you want explaining all of this. She spent years inside the system, city council, the Knesset, Israel's parliament, actually getting things done through it. She's not just experienced. She's an expert who has lived the thing she's about to break down. Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. Speaker 2 (4:08) Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Happy it worked out. Speaker 1 (4:12) So let's go directly into the conversation. I want to really understand the Israeli election experience. I'm going to go broad and get more specific as we go along. And the first segment, the first idea I really want to speak about with you about is why does Israel keep having elections? Israel has had 25 elections to date. And if I did my math correctly, 25 elections in how many years has Israel been around? Not yet 80 years, right? So it hasn't been around 80 years and it has had 25 elections. Most Americans think they understand elections. Last election in America, in the United States, we voted either for Donald Trump, the guy in the ballot for the Republican Party, or voted for Kamala Harris running for the Democratic Party. It has one person, one party. They either win or they lose. Leadership, that's how it works. And if you're listening from the UK or Canada or Australia or South Africa or Mexico or wherever you are, you're probably thinking, sure, my system doesn't work exactly like that either. And maybe I said one of those countries incorrectly. I vote for a local candidate or my ballot has preferences or my countries had actual coalition governments too. So, okay, I get you. I feel you. But Israel is stranger than all of those. So let's start with the basics. When Israelis go to the ballot boxes in October or anytime, can you explain simply what an Israeli actually votes for? Speaker 2 (5:37) Okay, so in Israeli, when you go into the ballot and you vote, you have boxes with many, many, many different sheets of paper that you can choose and put in the envelope and vote for. And it's important for me to say that there are many of them because you choose a party that you believe in the party. And there can be six, seven, eight, nine, 10, many different parties in the Israeli parliament. Out of these parties, okay. I'm with you. Okay, whoever gets the most votes or whoever has the most chances of forming a coalition after the elections, this is something that's being figured out. And then the different parties, they say who they believe in, one of the leaders of one of the parties and the president, which is more, our system is more kind of like the... British queen, okay, the queen of England. So he has the members of the different parties come in and say who they recommend or who, and then whoever has the most, the most possibility of being able to form a coalition, they're granted the option to form a coalition. And then they have time to form the coalition. If they're successful, Then the government is voted in and they start working if they're not successful. And that's what we've been seeing over the past few years, time after time. If no one is successful in forming a coalition, you go back to elections. And there can be one party that gets an opportunity to form a coalition and they may not be successful. And then another party can get an opportunity to form a coalition, which basically what it means is that once our elections are over, it... doesn't mean everything is over. It means that we're still trying to figure out who will be the next leader of the state of Israel. And Speaker 1 (7:35) how do you actually build a political party? Meaning like if you get 3.25 % of the vote, then you're able to form a party. But it wasn't always that way. In Israel's founding... Through 1988, it was around 1%, and then it was raised to 1.5%, and then 2%, and now it's 3.25%. Does that weigh into the whole calculus? Speaker 2 (8:01) Yes. I mean, most parties are not democratic parties in any way. There is no way that the people of Israel vote to decide, or the members of the party vote to decide, who would be their representatives in the party. It's often someone charismatic that starts his party. He brings in either, you know, people he agrees with or people he knows or people he believes in or whatever, and they form a party. He's the head of the party. Usually, it's usually a he. Speaker 1 (8:31) Yeah, I was going to say you keep on saying he because it is usually, it has been recent. I was looking at the head of all the parties right now, and it's all men. Speaker 2 (8:40) It's all men, yeah. Women did head parties in Israel, but usually women have more, they're... more chances of heading a party when it's an organized party with a democratic system, when things are very clear. Usually when it's not clear, that's in feminist theory, it's all over the place. Whenever there are no very set rules, usually women can't make it. Speaker 2 (9:09) Meaning not Speaker 1 (9:10) structurally, not by the law or the rule, but by reality. Speaker 2 (9:14) Yeah, when it's not structured. So they're heads of parties. And if they're charismatic enough, if they're loved enough by Israeli society or whatever, they can start, I mean, whoever wants can start their own party, but then they have chances of actually being elected. And we see that there are quite a few candidates that have you know, by the polls, at least they have, you know, a lot of votes were like, got the Eisencourt and the I will appear then. And Bennett that joined a lapid and, and the ultra Orthodox, right. They also have their parties. Their parties also aren't democratic parties. Um, and you know, and they will be elected probably. Uh, and then there, there are a group of people that are trying to form their own parties. Uh, no one knows if they'll crush the cross the threshold. No one knows if it will happen. And they're trying. And then they might merge to make sure they cross the threshold. And then there are also the Democratic parties, which is mainly the Democrats, it's called, the Democratic. That's a new party that was formed from a few other parties. And then there's the Likud that almost all of the seats used to be by primaries. And now Netanyahu is, there's a big, big campaign going on. within the Likud that he wants more seats that he can decide on his own, like the heads of many other parties. And there are several parties that have, but that's basically, that's what's going on now. So the threshold used to be so much lower, okay? And why does that matter? It matters because when you want to start a new party, the threshold now is 200,000 votes. That's a very... high number. Okay. Like I run an organization that helps reservist families. Okay. In Israel, they're nearly 400,000 reservists. Like just to give you a, uh, like to understand what a large percentage is to have 200,000 people vote for you. And otherwise all the votes just, you know, you just lose them all. So this is a big thing. Wow. The past, the threat. Yeah. They're all, they're just gone. They don't go, Speaker 1 (11:26) meaning that you can't like, you can't be like, hey, the number, like, you know, you don't like get to use that currency elsewhere. Be like, that's my number one pick is Likud. My number two pick is labor. And Speaker 2 (11:37) you can't say my number one is whatever Gilad Ardan that's trying to start his, form his own party. And if you, if he doesn't cross the threshold, so we'll give it to the Likud. You can't do that. Okay, you, that's it. And so people are afraid their votes, they lose their votes. Their votes will be thrown like to the garbage. That's how people say it. So that's why it's very important. And when the threshold was lower, so it meant that new parties could merge. And why is it so important in these specific elections? We are, we are. After almost three years of war, okay, and the elections would be after three years of war, we're in a situation that there is a lot of the relationship between Israeli society and Israeli politics is very messy. There isn't much trust. Israeli society doesn't have much trust in Israeli politics. And this should have been a moment where new politicians would rise. But it's very hard for new politicians to rise. And you see that most of the politicians that are in power are those that were in power before the threshold was, you know, was up. So that's a big thing. Because the threshold is so high, chances are that only if you are in power, you'll be able to stay in power as a party. So that's a big thing. Speaker 1 (12:57) Yeah, that's Speaker 2 (12:58) a Speaker 1 (12:58) part of the system that, thank you so much for explaining that, that I think many of us are confused about. So let's go into the fact that no party, as I understand it, well, no party has ever won outright. It's never been the case that any party has ever won a majority in Israel's history. And to win a majority, that means 61 of 120 seats. Why not? Why has it been the case that nobody has ever done this? And I know that in 1969, Hama'arach, meaning the alignment, was the closest ever to doing this. They had 56 seats, led by Golda Meir. Golda Meir, almost the first time a party would ever have a majority in Israel's history, right? But that still never happened. And never happened. So why not? And walk me through what happens instead. Speaker 2 (13:47) Okay, so first of all, I think one of the reasons it doesn't happen is because that Israel is formed of many different groups. that are used to have their own parties, okay? We have the ultra-Orthodox parties, which are, the ultra-Orthodox are mainly like 13 % of Israeli society, but because their percentage of voting is very high, so their parties are usually a little more than their percentage in Israeli society. So this is like, if you imagine like 15 % of the votes are ultra-Orthodox, okay? And then you also have the Arab society that also usually vote for... Arab parties. Okay. So then they also, they're 20 % of Israel, 22 % of Israeli society. So they're, they usually vote less than their, their percentage in the society. So then you also have, you know, I don't know, 15, 15 seats that are, um, that are Arab, but two in 10 and 15, it depends. It depends what happens. So you have these two groups that always vote or almost always vote. to their parties. And that's why the large parties, first of all, will never have the majority. And then you add also Zionist, the Orthodox Zionist. Speaker 1 (15:00) It's religious Zionist in English, but they don't necessarily, Rachel, they don't necessarily represent all religious Zionists. Speaker 2 (15:06) No, but in the past, in the past, it was more of a party like my parents always voted. I come from right wing hand, right wing house. My parents always voted. One voted for the Likud and one voted for the Mafdal, which was the party of the religious. National religious. Speaker 1 (15:23) Yeah. Speaker 2 (15:23) Yeah. So like, you know, and that is something they said, we're voting for the Likud. So they'll have the majority and, you know, they'd be able to form the coalition. We're voting for the Mafdal. or for the religious zones because they will take care of our school system, the education. And Israelis are used to thinking that way. It makes a lot of sense that couples will speak between themselves and say we vote one for this and one for that. And that's something that I don't think Americans can imagine that because it's very different. But when there are few agendas that are important to you, And there's one party that leads this agenda and one party that leads more of this agenda. I was a member, when I was a member of the parliament, I was in the party that did a lot of work regarding social and economical issues. And we knew that a lot of our vote, a lot of the people that voted for us, often in the family, they'd say, you know, okay, I'll vote. One would vote for like for a large party. One vote for one would vote for our party because we're more of, you know, the social. social aspect and not