Amir Weitman, 47, father of six, who earned a Master’s degree in International Relations from the Geneva and Hebrew universities, works as the head of a venture capital fund, and founder of the Likud Liberals, on Sunday published in Mida an essay titled “Gantz’s Plot to Dismantle the Democracy (תוכנית גנץ להרס הדמוקרטיה).”
Referring to the Defense Minister and Chairman of the National Camp party’s “Plan to Stabilize the Government System” issued last Friday, Weitman points out that Gantz’s plan includes legislation according to which the Knesset will be dissolved only with a majority of seventy MKs, the mandatory dissolution of the Knesset in case of failure to pass a budget, limiting the term of office of the Prime Minister to eight years, and defining a “minimum time between elections.”
These steps, according to Gantz, are crucial to the stability of the Israeli political system, without which the country won’t be able to deal with the cost of living, education, and many other national challenges. He claimed that “the instability leads to political paralysis, to the loss of public trust, to an increase in the phenomenon of political extortions, and fatal harm to Israeli democracy,” concluding: “This must not be allowed to happen.”
Weitman agrees – who doesn’t? – that political stability is crucial to the government’s ability to function. But are the Gantz proposals a recipe to securing this end?
The Knesset will be dissolved only by a majority of seventy MKs. What would such a proposal do? Imagine, for example, political circumstances similar to the current ones, with a government that doesn’t enjoy a majority but has more than fifty mandates and so the opposition has no way to reach the needed seventy votes to force new elections.
In such a scenario, Weitman argues, as in today’s reality, with the opposition unable to force elections, the result is chaos and anarchy. The government can’t pass laws because it doesn’t have the required 61-seat majority, and the opposition, by definition has no responsibility to promote policy.
The government will only be able to pass laws for which it can enlist the support of some of the coalition members, making for only strange laws enacted by strange bedfellows. As a result, every single day-to-day legislation will end up requiring a special majority, making the government’s task impossible.
Meanwhile, this chaotic instability will continue into the ultimate sunset of the government, preventing the voters from intervening through the ballot box.
On the mandatory dissolution of the Knesset in case of failure to pass a budget, Weitman agrees that the government can’t rule without a budget. But making a budget mandatory as per Gantz’s proposal, turns the budget into a political tool, at the expense of the state. In the end, governments can’t survive anyway without a budget, and adding it as an existential threat will not help matters.
Limiting the term of office of the Prime Minister to eight years is part of Gantz’s grand, anti-democratic delusion, according to Weitman. “There is not a single country in the world that has both a parliamentary regime and limits the duration of the prime minister’s term. It does not exist, because in a parliamentary system the citizens vote for the House of Representatives, and it is the members of the House of Representatives who choose the government and the Prime Minister,” he writes.
“The role of the Prime Minister is of course very important, but in its essence, it derives its power from the consent of the sovereign, which is the House of Representatives,” he asserts. “The attempt to deny the sovereign the possibility of appointing individuals to positions in government will create an obviously illogical restriction.”
Term limits make sense in the US and France, where the executive enjoys a pre-set time in office, given directly by the voter, to prevent tyranny. But in parliamentary systems, where the will of the voter is exercised every day and governments can be toppled at any given time, there are sufficient restrictions in place to prevent tyranny, and adding more restrictions will deprive the voter of his democratic right to choose the government.
Defining a “minimum time between elections” is yet another way of pushing back the voter’s right to call the shots in the political system. Beyond questions such as what is the minimum time, Weitman writes, “this proposal brings us back exactly to the first question – what will happen when before the end of the minimum time nobody has a majority, but it is still not possible to go to the elections?” You guessed it: again, chaos.
Gantz’s plan is yet another case in which Israeli politicians demonstrate a basic lack of understanding of constitutional law and allow themselves to play with fire in issues concerning the foundations of the political system, Weitman concludes, adding: “The knights of democracy in their own eyes are doing everything to undermine it and finally destroy it. The harmful ideas that Gantz is talking about now will further damage the proper functioning of Israeli democracy, and in practice will achieve the exact opposite of stability.”
