Israeli General Election: April 9, 2019

[brucejoel99]

I am always surprised how Likud support always seems to hold up despite various Netanyahu scandals.

[brucejoel99]

Don't like her, but Shaked is hot.

sexist...

Lol when did calling a woman "hot" become offensive? Why does calling a woman "hot" attract backlash for a man when the case is quite the opposite if/when a woman calls a man "hot"?

[brucejoel99]

Don't like her, but Shaked is hot.

sexist...

Lol when did calling a woman "hot" become offensive? Why does calling a woman "hot" attract backlash for a man when the case is quite the opposite if/when a woman calls a man "hot"?

While I agree with you; and as a gay guy I refer to attractive men as 'Hot' all the time without backlash; I would say 'Hot' in a political sense is more objectifying than saying something like 'she's attractive' or something of that sense.

Okay, yeah. Understandable lol

Not really anything to get feathers ruffled over, though.

True, my bad.

All I want is for despicable and corrupt Bibi to get the boot. Maybe him and Trump can share a jail cell.

This this this 1000x this

[brucejoel99]

This is my prediction for the election:

KL- 29 Seats
Likud- 28 Seats
Labour- 8 Seats
United Torah Judaism- 7 Seats
Hadash-Ta'al- 7 Seats
Zehut- 7 Seats
United Right Wing Parties- 6 Seats
New Right- 5 Seats
Shas- 5 Seats
Kulanu- 5 Seats
Meretz- 5 Seats
Yisrael Beiteinu- 4 Seats
Ra'am-Balad- 4 Seats
Gesher- 0 Seats

Why? Because I'm a pessimist. I hope the center-left overperforms and at least YB and Kulanu\Shas drop below the threshold, but my prediction is simply a repeat of 2015- right-wingers coming home and a scare campaign turning them out in droves.

With a result like this, are the chances high that Rivlin gives Netanyahu the task of forming a government even though he wouldn't be the head of the largest party (i.e. like Peres did in 2009, based upon the judgment that Netanyahu is in a better position numerically to put together a coalition since Likud's potential partners on the political right will have won more seats than the parties of the centre-left, who would more likely support Gantz)?

[brucejoel99]

This is one of those elections that makes me glad that the United States doesn't have a parliamentary system. In spite of all the numerous faults in our political system, we would be even worse off if we had elections like this.

I also must say that it's disturbing how tolerated corruption lately has become in our world and its politics. It's yet another election that is just way too typical for our timeline.

Parliamentary systems are actually pretty resistant at preventing huge takeovers from undemocratic forces compared to two-Party systems. It allows for more debate and nuance in coalition buildings that the strict orthodoxy of a two-party system doesn’t allow for. It also allows for breakaway factions and coalition disbandment if the government starts to slip up against the constituents interest.

Look at how Trump or Modi rose through for the ills of having no parliamentary system, two very baggage-heavy candidates, who got propelled merely because of tactical nose holding in a FPTP system. Look at how the Canadian Conservatives are going to win with 35% of the vote, even though 50-60% of the vote will go to a centrist party and two center-leftist+ parties. Look at how awful most FPTP political scenes actually are.

What you should really be blaming is the Israeli electorate for sucking on the teats of Reaktion, not their parliamentary system.

FPTP has really benefited India and India does have a parliamentary system lol. Also in a proportional system it is almost always impossible to take down the incumbent party.


FPTP is more Democratic than Proportional IMO

Probably not good to help continue this unrelated off-topic tangent in this thread, but oh well b/c it needs to be called out that FPTP is definitely NOT more democratic than proportional representation.

The democratic benefits to proportional representation are both extensive & convincing. The proportionality aspect alone makes proportional representation very attractive in that a nation's elections can manifest into results that truly represent the desires of the electorate. Additional advantages are a greater social representation, proportional representation allows for a larger mix of officeholders to be elected at one time (rather than just the one winner in each district/constituency/riding/etc. found in FPTP) thus creating a greater ethnic, religious, gender, age, background, etc. proportionality; & a greater political representation in that proportional representation ensures that the smaller parties are fairly represented in the legislature through downplaying the successes of the larger parties which can be clearly evident in FPTP.

In contrast to the use of proportional representation, it can very easily be argued that the use of FPTP produces not just undemocratic results, but undesirable ones. FPTP tends to produce incredibly disproportionate results to the true desires of the electorate, under-representing smaller parties, over-representing the victorious parties, & producing a huge number of wasted votes that only goes so far as to fuel apathy for those voters. No democratically thinking individual can view such results as fair to the electorate that voted. And further issues with the use of FPTP would be the issue of gerrymandering, which can create incredibly targeted district/constituency/riding/etc. boundaries that only seek to cement safe seats, as well as the creation of a false impression of public opinion.

So far, there has been a substantial bulk of evidence pointing towards the preferential status of proportional representation over the use of FPTP, thus thoroughly refuting your contention (bolded above).

[brucejoel99]

So I just woke up, and not much has changed. Are we still waiting on military/prison/some outstanding stuff, or is the 65-55 distribution on Google final?

The double envelopes (military, prisons, foreign embassies, hospitals) that can amount to 250K votes are yet to be counted. With Balad and NR on the edge it can be meaningful. in the worst case it becomes 70-50

Is the best case 60-60 by any chance, or still about 65-55?

[brucejoel99]

September 17th has now been confirmed as the election date if the Knesset passes the dissolution bill.