In 1992, Yitzchak Rabin had a 62-seat coalition, and when Shas quit, Rabin and Peres brought the Oslo disaster down upon us by literally buying some MKs from the Tzomet party. Yet, one doesn’t recall hearing the hypocritical left complaining about the size of Rabin’s coalition (or his open bribery),like they’re doing today against Netanyahu’s.
Netanyahu’s 61-seat coalition is an interesting one. It’s also potentially quite stable, and might be able to accomplish everything it wants to, but it does have one notable Achilles heel.
Each party has made it clear what issues are important to them, both in terms of what they want to accomplish, and where their red lines are.
It also appears that each party (or most, at least) have the ability to put a spike in the spokes of their co-parties if they so wish.
For instance, Shas can undermine Bennett via the Education committee, while Bennett can undermine Shas via the Justice Ministry. There’s a surprising set of checks and balances that have been put in place.
If the parties agree to play nice together, they’ll be able to get a lot done. But if they don’t respect one another’s needs, there will be deadlocks all around.
The parties will just need to recognize this.
No one is going to get 100% of what they want, but by working together, I think they’ll all get more than 50%.
Democracy may be messy, but it does work.
There’s one unfortunate Achilles heel in the coalition – and that is Kulanu.
They are openly Leftwing, and that makes them the odd bird out.
While Bennett now has the power to easily end the “housing crisis” with additional construction in Judea and Samaria – that’s probably not the solution that Kachlon’s party wants to see.
And while Kulanu doesn’t appear to have a direct check against Bennett, they can instead threaten Netanyahu that they’re going to pull out of the coalition, and then Netanyahu will have to put the breaks on Bennett.
I suspect, as time goes on, when Kulanu starts to actually build something, they’ll be disinclined to abandon their investments too quickly – but until then, everyone is going to be walking on eggshells around them.
I believe that in this Knesset we’ll see some important and positive developments in Judea and Samaria, and a big step in limiting the High Court’s anti-democratic judicial activism.
I am concerned our taxes and cost of living are going to go up, and perhaps I’ll write about that in a different post.
But overall, I’m feeling optimistic — and the more the Left whines about the coalition, the more optimistic we all should be.