Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Alan Dowty

The Olmert era in Israeli politics is drawing to a close. Faced by no fewer than five ongoing investigations for various improprieties, the prime minister was forced to call new elections for leadership of his own Kadima party. By a surprisingly slim margin of less than one percent, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni edged out the more hawkish Shaul Mofaz, transport minister and former chief of staff and minister of defense, and will try to form a new government coalition.

One of the puzzles of Israeli politics has always been the weakness of the center. The electoral system, with pure party-list proportional representation and a threshold of only two percent, guarantees the proliferation of parties. And, as elsewhere, Israeli public opinion clusters around the center. Yet centrist parties have never gained traction in the system; typically they made an initial splash (in 1977, 1999, and 2003), and then faded from the scene before the next election.

The odds would seem to be against Kadima escaping this historical pattern. The party was formed around a dominant personality, Ariel Sharon, who then disappeared from the scene in the midst of the 2006 election campaign. Initially projected to win an astonishing 30-40 seats of the 120 in the Knesset, the party under Olmert managed to pull through the election with 29 seats, still the largest single party and, by virtue of its centrality, the dominant force in Israeli government. But with the double debacle of 2006-07—the inglorious war with Hezbollah and the Hamas takeover of Gaza—plus the growing sleaze factor, Kadima was sagging badly in the polls and seemed destined to go the way of its predecessors. Many or most of its voters, who came from Likud on the right, seemed set to return to Likud.

But the change in leadership may give Kadima a new lease on life. Livni enjoys considerable personal popularity, based in part on an image of squeaky-clean integrity—a great advantage in a political climate where (beyond Olmert) four cabinet ministers and eight other Knesset members are under investigation for various alleged misdeeds. Polls indicated that she alone, of potential Kadima leaders, might be able to defeat Likud’s Netanyahu in the next elections.

Livni will have 42 days to form a new government. This will not be an easy task, but it is made somewhat easier by the fact that all four present coalition partners—Kadima, Labor, the Pensioners’ Party, and the Sephardi ultra-orthodox Shas—would, according to current projections, lose seats in new elections. Nevertheless, Shas in particular is expected to demand a high price, including a commitment to non-compromise on Jerusalem that would severely handicap ongoing negotiations with the Palestinians (not that these negotiations have any immediate prospect of going anywhere). To offset the demands of Shas, Livni will talk with Meretz on the left and even toy with other parties on the right.

New elections are due in mid-2010 in any event, but should Livni fail to form a government, a new Knesset would be elected in February or March 2009. A Teleseker poll from September 10 has Likud at 29 seats and Kadima under Livni at 25 seats (Kadima under Mofaz would have won only 17 seats, a decisive argument for Livni in the party primary). Thus, under Livni, Kadima does seem to have a fair shot at coming in first again and remaining the vital central force without which no government could be formed. But the same poll showed other right-wing and religious parties gaining a combined 34 seats, demonstrating the equal or greater likelihood that Netanyahu could form a narrow right-religious coalition, leaving Kadima in the political wilderness—which would probably be the death knell for the party. Once again, the survival of a strong center in Israeli politics hangs in the balance.

In the meantime, should Livni become prime minister even temporarily, Israel would apparently become the first nation to have women simultaneously at the head of all three branches of government—Dalia Itzik being speaker of the Knesset and Dorit Beinisch president of the Supreme Court.