Israeli General Election: April 9, 2019

[Former President tack50]

This election is shaping up to be a "walk in the park" for Netanyahu.

Anyway, interesting graph, i found, about the history of Israeli elections since 1949:

Israel seems to have moved a lot to the right since independence, why?

[Former President tack50]

Why couldn't the Arabs launch new parties if their parties were banned? Canada elected a communist under the "Labour-Progressive" ticket while the Communist Party was banned for example.

Not sure how comparable it is, but here when Batasuna (the party of terrorist group ETA) was banned; they usually created "sock parties" to contest elections.

Sometimes those socks were caught in time (the 2009 Basque election was particularly notorious as it directly affected the result); sometimes they weren't (like in the 2005 election which they contested as Communist Party of the Basque Homelands)

[Former President tack50]

Lol, so according to that poll in the (unlikely) event of a grand coalition, Hadash-Taal would be the official opposition?

I wonder how Israelis would react to the Arab party being the opposition.

[Former President tack50]

So Ra'am-Balad was in the end able to participate in the elections?

Yes, the courts overturned that decision and banned one of the Kahanists instead.

What kind of justification did the courts use to justify that decision? Banning the Kahanists and not Raam-Balad?

[Former President tack50]

What kind of justification did the courts use to justify that decision? Banning the Kahanists and not Raam-Balad?

The courts didn't publish their reasoning, but in general their isn't really any connection between the two, and the reason for (attempted) banning was different (incitement to racism for the Kahanist versus opposing a Jewish state for RAAM-BALAD).

Don't Raam-Balad pretty clearly oppose a Jewish state? I'd have thought the reason for a ban was crystal clear.

[Former President tack50]

Looking at those results, I wonder, what would happen if small parties lost a bit more of support to their closest ideological ally?

The only parties that aren't close to the threshold are Likud, B&W, UTJ and Shas. On paper, a result like this wouldn't be that unthinkable:


Likud: 31%
B&W: 30%
Shas: 6%
UTJ 6%
Hadash-Taal: 3%
Labour: 3%
YB: 3%
URWP: 3%
Meretz: 3%
Kulanu: 3%
Balad-Raam: 3%
New Right: 3%
Zehut: 3%

That would mean 27% of the vote being wasted and going directly to the thrash can.

It's a big assumption, but if Israeli politics somehow becomes polarized between 2 parties I could see it happening. Even with Israel's proportional system that doesn't mean PR automatically means a multi party system.

Of course in practice I imagine we would see several mergers well before that happens. So for example the 2 Arab coalitions would merge. Same for Labor and Meretz I assume.