On November 1, Israelis will vote in their fifth national election in less than four years. Examining the roots of the current political deadlock, Haviv Rettig Gur, interviewing Shany Mor—both regular writers for Mosaic—notes the effects of a seemingly minor reform adopted in 2014. That reform raised the electoral threshold—the minimum proportion of votes required for a party to be represented in the Knesset—from 2 percent to 3.25 percent. Rather than reducing the influence of the fringe political parties, as its proponents promised it would, increasing the threshold appears to have had the opposite effect:
Most Arab-majority parties drew between 2 percent and 4 percent of the vote [in 2014] and so were threatened by the change. Most far-right Jewish parties drew less than 2 percent; the increase seemingly put the Knesset far beyond their reach. But, explained the reformers, that only meant they’d have to join with factions outside the confines of their narrow ideological camp, a requirement that would force them to moderate their views and, ultimately, strengthen their representation in parliament.
But the parties didn’t unify as quickly as expected, and elections came to be decided by which small factions avoided the grim fate that waited at the cutoff. Instead of reducing their importance, the new threshold transformed the tiniest factions into the pivot of every ensuing election. Victory for the largest parties became dependent on the fate of the smallest. A slight drop in Arab turnout or increase in right-wing turnout would, by the merciless logic of the new threshold, decide the fate of national politics.
Once-untouchable extremists on the Jewish right were brought into the fold, from the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit to the homophobic Noam. Instead of freeing the larger parties from the burden of marginal players, those margins were empowered. . . . Balad, the most fervently Palestinian-nationalist and explicitly anti-Zionist of the Arab parties—and also the least popular, the only one that struggled to clear even the pre-2014 threshold of 2 percent—[after being forced into a merger with the somewhat more moderate Ḥadash] had been granted a veto over Arab politics writ large that it hadn’t possessed before the threshold reform.
That should not have surprised the threshold reformers of 2014. It’s a basic rule of negotiations: the most strident party, the one more willing to walk away, is inevitably the one with the upper hand.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-threshold-of-political-pain-how-a-tiny-reform-radicalized-israeli-politics/