What Kind of Coalition?: Ariel Sharon & the 16th Knesset

As everyone knows by now, the January 28 Israeli elections produced a solid victory for Ariel Sharon’s Likud party, which won 38 seats in the 16th Knesset, doubling the number of seats won in the last election. (Following a post-election merger with the Russian-emigrant-based Yisrael ba’Aliya, Likud now has 40.) The greatest defeat was that of the once-dominant Labor Party, which won only 19 seats, a loss of seven from the 15th Knesset.

But Israeli politics is never a two-horse race. Likud clearly “won” the election, and Sharon will clearly be the Prime Minister, but in all of Israel’s history, no single party — not even Labor’s predecessor Mapai in the early days of David Ben Gurion when it was totally dominant — has ever won a majority in the Knesset. All Israeli governments are coalitions, and small parties use this fact to force concessions from the major parties. Sharon will be Prime Minister, but he is already facing some challenges in putting together the kind of government he would like.

The overall face of the new Knesset is not so solidly right wing as the results for the two major parties might initially suggest. In fact, if Sharon were to try to put together a “narrow” government of the right, it would likely be able to govern with only a seat or two’s majority. A narrow government is an option, and certainly a fallback position, but Sharon says he does not want one. With war apparently looming in the region, Sharon has frequently insisted he wants another national unity government, including Labor. Others are pushing for a “secular” coalition consisting of Likud, Labor, and Shinui, the ardently secularist party which surged to third place in the Knesset in the elections, going from only six seats in the last session to 15 in this. Many Labor voters seem to have fled Labor not for the far left but for the center, and Shinui has benefited accordingly. Shinui’s sometimes controversial leader, Tommy Lapid, is the subject of the Profile in this issue.

This Dossier looks at the options for a coalition, which Sharon is currently seeking to assemble, examining the options and the likely implications of the overall election results.

Ariel Sharon can feel considerable personal triumph given the size of Likud’s victory in the Israeli elections, and it is also true that he can, to some extent, rest assured that he will be able to form a viable government, since even a narrow right-wing government would still have a several-seat majority. The question is whether or not he can assemble the sort of broader government of national unity which would be appropriate for a wartime government, and also which might allow him to achieve some sort of breakthrough agreement with the Palestinians, which despite their intense distrust of him, he really does apparently feel he might be able to deliver.

Sharon has been many things in his career, but a compromiser and conciliator has never been one of them. Yet it is those talents he will need to develop if he is somehow going to draw the Labor Party into the government.

Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna continues to insist that Labor will not serve in a national unity government. But others in Labor are saying that Mitzna should step aside, having led the party to defeat in the elections. At one point during the campaign Mitzna reportedly said that if he did not deliver at least 20 seats for Labor he would step aside: Labor won only 19. But Mitzna is insisting that he intends to remain in office and lead the opposition in the Knesset, despite calls for him to consider a national unity government. Veteran party leader Shimon Peres openly called for Labor to at least hear Sharon’s proposals before rejecting them, and other Labor officials were also reportedly open to the possibility of a unity government. A group of heads of local Labor Party councils called on February 6 for the Party to remain open to the possibility. It seemed likely, at presstime, that when Sharon begins to meet with party leaders in the coming week, he will at least invite Labor leaders to meet with him.

Final Official Election Results: Knesset Seats By Party Party No. of Seats (Total 120) Total Votes % of Total Vote         Likud 38 (40*) 925,279 29.4% Labor-Meimad 19 455,183 14.5% Shinui 15 386,535 12.3% Shas 11 258,879 8.2% National Unity 7 173,973 5.5% Meretz 6 164,122 5.2% National Religious Party 6 132,370 4.2% Torah and Shabbat Judaism 5 135,087 4.3% Hadash 3 93,819 3.0% Am Ehad 3 86,808 2.8% National Democratic Assembly (Balad) 3 71,299 2.3% Yisrael Ba’Aliya 2* 67,719 2.2% United Arab List 2 65,551 2.1% Fifteen party lists failed to receive the minimum of 1.5% of the vote required to win seats in the Knesset. * Following the elections, the Russian immigrant party Yisrael Ba’Aliya, led by Natan Sharansky, voted to merge with Likud, raising Likud’s total number of seats to 40.

The timetable is as follows: President Moshe Katsav will officially ask Sharon to try to form a government this weekend, starting the clock running. Sharon then has 28 days in which to form a government, but may ask for an extension of another 14 days. That would give him a total of 42 days to form his government, but given the widespread expectation that war with Iraq will begin sooner than that, it is unlikely that he will indulge in a long process. He can form a narrow government of the right at any time, after all.

The question of what kind of government might be formed is of more than academic interest. A narrow government of the right would probably have little hope of restarting talks with the Palestinians, even if a new Palestinian leadership does emerge. In fact, Sharon has become something of a dove within his own party, at least by comparison with Binyamin Netanyahu and other critics on the right, since Sharon has at least talked about the possibility of accepting a Palestinian state in some form in the near term, and has indicated that he favors something akin to the proposed US “roadmap”, though with conditions of his own.

Sharon has said all along that he wants a national unity government. Many on Labor’s left wing think that Labor stayed in the last national unity government too long, and that this contributed to the party’s poor showing, though there are other ways of interpreting the results. Even if Mitzna relents and joins, Labor will have less leverage in this government than it did in the last one, since the rightwing parties can easily form a majority of their own. A broad government might conceivably be formed as a short-term wartime measure, but might not survive the end of a war with Iraq.

Another factor in any national unity government is the fact that the third largest party, Shinui, and the fourth largest, Shas, have diametrically opposite views and will not in normal circumstances serve together. Shas is a Sephardic religious party; Shinui campaigns to end the dominance of Orthodoxy in Israeli society and favors running public transportation on the Sabbath and other measures. Shinui leader Tommy Lapid (Profile, this issue) has said that he would consider serving in a unity Cabinet with religious parties only during a wartime emergency and would not remain in such a government after a war.

A number of other considerations always come into play. Historically there is a tradition that governments are formed without relying on extremist parties of the left or right. On the left, this has traditionally meant excluding the Communists, and also not relying for a majority on Arab parties (the phrase being that governments need a “Zionist majority”). On the right, this has meant excluding hard-right parties that favor expulsion of the Palestinians, or those linked to violence.

This time around, the ultra-rightwing parties did not generally win enough seats to get into the Knesset. Of the parties that did get in, one, Avigdor Lieberman’s National Unity Party, might be a problem if it is included in a narrow rightwing government, since it opposes a Palestinian state. (So do many in Likud, but Sharon is prepared to accept the necessity of a state.) Sharon can, however, form a narrow government even without Lieberman’s party, as the box on the previous page shows.

It seems to be the case that Sharon really does believe that he could achieve some sort of peace agreement with a new Palestinian leadership, and sees himself as indispensable in the “only Nixon could go to China” sense: that is, as a veteran hardliner himself, he has the credibility to sell a peace deal to the Israeli public. The problem is that the vision of peace Sharon has so far expressed is not likely to win any takers on the Palestinian side.

But this seems to be behind Sharon’s determination to put together as broad a government as possible, one in which he will not be hampered by critics from the right. That, however, most likely implies persuading Labor to join.

Tommy Lapid of Shinui, who is known for his outspokenness, was his usual blunt self on the subject: he said that if Mitzna refused to join a unity government, Labor should dump Mitzna and get a new leader. Certainly Mitzna, once seen as the hope of the Israeli peace camp, disappointed a lot of his admirers with the poor showing he delivered for Labor. And if Labor is seen as sitting out a national unity government at a critical moment it could hurt the party still further. While the rank and file are unlikely to dump Mitzna precipitately, there are signs, as noted earlier, of growing pressures within Labor to join a grand coalition.

Also as noted previously, although Sharon has up to 42 days to form a government, no one really expects him to take that long. The impending war with Iraq is very likely to involve Israel in some way, even if the country does not become a belligerent. Incoming Iraqi missiles, like those fired against Israel in 1991, would greatly increase pressure for a government quickly, and Sharon will almost certainly try to put a government together before the shooting starts.

In the meantime, analysts will no doubt spend a great deal of time trying to discern the meaning of the 16th Knesset elections. Clearly, Likud is stronger than it has ever been, but this may in fact merely be a function of concern over the continuing wave of suicide bombings and other attacks, combined with the continuing decline of the Labor Party.

The decline of Labor has been under way for a long time, and in some ways marks the passing of the old, largely Ashkenazi, often European-born generation of the founders of the state. Israel’s population is increasingly from the Sephardic and Oriental (Mizrahi) Jewish communities, and increasingly rightwing in politics regardless of issues relating to peace. The old, socialist system of the early days of the state has gradually been replaced; the decline of Labor is in some ways mirrored by the decline of the kibbutz. Israeli voters do seem to favor peace, and in recent years that has been the main issue in elections, which has kept Labor in the game longer than might have otherwise been the case.

Where are Labor voters going? Clearly, many of them went to Shinui. Back in the 1970s, the original Democratic Movement for Change (of which Shinui is a direct heir) sought to provide a new, centrist, non-socialist alternative to Labor and Likud. It failed, but perhaps it was a generation ahead of its time. But does the rise of Shinui also mean a rejection of the role of Orthodox Judaism in Israel? This is another question that the analysts will likely pick over for years to come. The majority of Israelis are secular, yet public transportation shuts down before the Sabbath, kosher restaurants are the norm in Jerusalem, and there is no civil marriage. (Because of the Orthodox role, even Reform and Conservative rabbis from the West are not recognized in Israel.) This system is rooted in the bargains made at the very beginning of the state itself, but some modern Israelis resent it very much, and that resentment is also reflected in the vote for Shinui. Whether in fact the 2003 elections mark a shift in the traditional relationship remains to be seen.

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